


Blood In, Blood Out

by Mr_Dynasty



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: BadBitchShipping, F/F, Miyamoto/J
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 02:01:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3832882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Dynasty/pseuds/Mr_Dynasty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Team Rocket's most storied enforcer rejoins the free world, to the chagrin of some within the hierarchy of the Team. When egos clash, will Miyamoto's new partner prove to be her biggest windfall, or greatest rival for the precarious position of favor she holds with the Madame Boss? Language/Violence. Slightly AU. Spin-off of PKMN2K10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "How Little You Know"

Miyamoto sat as demurely as one could in a cheap vinyl bench-seat. The seedy place Ariana had asked to meet with her was not at all in line with the simple elegance that both women typically tried to exude, but for some conversations, dive bars were just more appropriate.

Nobody inside the pub looked more than once at their flash or their colors. It was easy to spot them for what they were, and that was all the more that anyone needed to know in Viridian City. When you were a Rocket, people did not ask questions, no matter how out of place you might've seemed. It was just an assumed thing. A VIP pass to anywhere one might've chosen to go in this town. They were a sort of reviled royalty, in that way.

Still, it was an unusual thing for a Rocket to drink here. Most of them usually took their pleasure in the same place where they did most of their business. The old dance-club on the northeast side that had been called several equally flashy and contrite names before it had gone out of business, and fallen well out of fashion. Now they just called it the HQ, though there were many more colorful references made to it by those other than themselves, she was sure.

Still, it served their pleasures well enough. Nobody there begrudged them a little off-duty R&R. There was always plenty of booze on hand, in variety and volume, certainly, and if what you were coming out for were some of the more illicit things you could find for yourself in a place like this, there were plenty of those things to be had too, if you asked around amongst the right brothers and sisters. Hell, most of the fully fledged rockets practically lived there. Some actually did, in fact.

For all but the most sociable and outgoing Rockets, a fuck or a bump was easier had amongst one's own. A drink, certainly so. To have asked her out here, meant this conversation was not for general consumption. They were here so the Admin could speak her mind without anyone overhearing.

But It wasn't just the location of this conversation that was so troublesome, to Miyamoto. It also had to do with the fact that Ariana was already sighing over the remnants of her sixth sherry, which foretold of a type of drunkenness that the Agent had never seen Ariana reduced to before.

For her own part, Miyamoto nursed absently at a pale draught beer, biding her time beneath the muted red incandescent light until she could be permitted to leave. This was a type of trouble she did not need. Shit getting stirred up amongst Admins was a whole level of power-play that she could not afford at the moment, with her reputation on the mend.

There had been a time when the only thing separating her from such a position was the lack of available positions. Now, after a close brush with the deeper intrigues, she was well contented to be her own sort of big fish in a small pond. She was eager to put this conversation behind her, regardless of it's actual content. Of course, you couldn't just come right out and say such a thing to a person who was essentially the Boss' right hand. She would just have to bide.

Still, as if sensing her invited guest's dismay, Ariana pointed two fingers that kicked up turbulence in the thick strata cigarette smoke that layered the air. She didn't slur, but there was a somewhat loping quality to her voice that was nearly as good by comparison. When someone like Ariana displayed even the most remote lack of discretion, it was a marked occasion. The Admin was normally so stiff she could make a corpse with rigor mortis look like he was having a relaxing evening.

"Cut the shit, alright? I know you're not thrilled to be here, but there's some things you gotta hear about the person you're going to meet tomorrow," Ariana practically spat, her eyes flashing a fair amount of freshly unbridled contempt. It was no real secret that Ariana didn't care for those of them that did the really dirty jobs. She sat up in the rarefied air, so that was to be expected, after all. "And you should be prepared for what meeting that person is going to mean for you."

If that's what she was concerned about, then this conversation would be much shorter than Miyamoto had expected, , the Agent sat back, and laid folded gloved hands over crossed legs. "I have no reason to be worried."

"I wouldn't be so sure." Ariana cautioned, some of the civility returning to her voice. "She's getting out of prison tomorrow. She did years of hard time for the Team, no complaints." Here she flicked her fingers again, tone once more growing accusatory. "You on the other hand, you're coming off a major setback. The Pallet expansion was supposed to oversee all our trafficking from Cinnabar, collect shipments off the coast under cover of darkness and distribute to rural suppliers. Now that's all just a pipe-dream because nobody can budge a fucking inch in Pallet anymore and the Team is eating the loss on your behalf."

Miyamoto frowned, but only slightly. The sting of the issue was months gone. She was now just more annoyed at hearing the story retold and again having to explain it. It made her feel like a floor-boss having to explain why a certain course of action was actually positive, when all upper-management could see was a downturn on a line graph that they knew little to nothing practical about. "It's wasn't a loss. We rooted out a traitor to the team and finished her for good. As far as I'm concerned, the whole venture going up in smoke ten times over is worth that."

Ariana nodded gravely, and sipped the last dregs of her drink, before waving it in the air impatiently, until she'd caught the barkeeps attention from across the room. "And more or less that's how the Boss sees it too, so that's fine. But how does it look from her perspective?"

There never seemed to be any proper names spent at their subject's expense, where Ariana was concerned. Some old beef? Miyamoto could only wonder.

"Doesn't matter." The Agent protested, concealing her bemusement. "I don't intend to start an opinion poll. She'll fall in step with me one way or another." Miyamoto sat one hand on the table and expanded the fingers before clenching it tightly, knuckles down against the scarred wood. There was an audible sound of muscle and bone even past that of creaking leather. "If I have to flex a little to get her there, it doesn't concern me."

Ariana sighed. She knew that Miyamoto was cut from a different stock. Unlike Ariana, who had been a young lieutenant close to the Boss before she'd inherited the gang from her father, Miyamoto had not always lived a life in the upper crusts of criminal luxury and fraternity.

She'd fended for herself most of her life, and cut a living in the gutters where kids her age had been dying of starvation and sickness, long before she'd worn the colors. Now well-naturalized, Miyamoto had been born a child of distant Castelia, where half a generation had fallen into poverty and homelessness after the global economic crisis of the previous decade.

It was from that mire that the Boss had elevated her, putting to use a vast array of unsavory talents, not the least of which was a considerable disregard for human life. Miyamoto was a hard woman, and her path through life had made her that way.

But hard women were difficult to reason with, at times for much the same reasons.. Ariana had risen high within the hierarchy of the team by showing her value to a girl that had outgrown her friendship and become a powerful leader, but the Admin had never been afraid to bow out to her betters when faced with the sorts of problems that Miyamoto was typically brought in to solve.

So far as Ariana was concerned, there were two types of strength at it's most basic level: that which you could apply to a given problem on your own, and that which you could convince others to apply at your behest. She was far more invested in the latter, not to mention more confident in her ability to levy it.

"Miyamoto," Ariana began, waving the violent gesture away without the slightest hint of interest. "That woman is not the type you want to become closely involved with. In any capacity."

"What do you mean?" Miyamoto asked, her hands returning to her lap where she left them folded plainly. "Everyone says she was the best before..."

The Rocket Agent did not chortle, keeping her mouth closed respectfully. Her eyes however, lit with a macabre satisfaction. "Before they put her on the inside."

"Before you came around, you mean," Ariana countered, with a scolding tone in her voice. A good sense of professional snottiness was not a foreign concept to the Admin, however. Rockets were the type that put notches in their belts, after all, even her.

Miyamoto shrugged in a way that was certainly meant to seem noncommittal to the casual observer, but was as good as acquiescence in truth. "I mean to say that she was well-respected and close to the Boss, by every account I've heard."

Ariana nodded, as a new drink was set in front of her. "That much is true, though in just what way, is a matter of perspective."

Miyamoto exhaled over the top of her beer, but humored the Rocket Admin, nonetheless. "Oh?"

"Utility of a sort does not make something utilitarian in general," Ariana said blithely. "You understand?"

Miyamoto nodded, but shrugged, as if to say she understood conceptually, but didn't follow the line of logic. "I suppose so."

"Sharpedos have big mouths, but you wouldn't take a blowjob from one." Ariana said, eyebrows flattened as she hammered out her point in a blunt and rude way that she knew Miyamoto would understand.

Now it was Miyamoto who scowled. "You think she's a liability?"

"No, not so much that as..." Here, the Admin paused and changed her mind. It was best that she didn't say more than was prudent. "Let's just say..."

It was clear that Ariana was dancing around the subject, which made Miyamoto want to get up and leave all the more. She shifted slightly, prompting the Admin to get on with it.

"Well, take you for example. The Boss likes you because you're a mean little cuss with no qualms whatsoever about getting nasty business done right," Ariana explained. "You're smart and trustworthy, sure, and that's why she doesn't keep you on a tight leash but the main thing is that you're cold-blooded and the Boss knows she can count on you when she can't count on anyone else, person or Pokemon."

Miyamoto licked her teeth behind her lips, but didn't say anything. That sort of self-satisfied expression really pushed the Admin's buttons. "Don't try to look cute, bitch. You know I'm right."

Miyamoto finally betrayed a bit of a laugh, though she did not shift in her seat. She made a noise that was as much affirmation as Ariana was likely to get.

The Admin took another big gulp of her sherry, tamping down her resolve. "Well, she was like that too. She was the first person the Boss recruited who could be totally and completely counted on that way."

"So we're both willing to spill blood?"

"More like you're both a special sort of psychotic that the Boss finds tractable enough for her liking," Ariana cautioned. "Let's just say I have my doubts that this town is big enough for the both of you."

Miyamoto did not acknowledge the slight to her person with anything more than a smirk. She'd punched people's teeth into their throats for less disrespect than that, but she'd let it slide on principle. Ariana outranked her, even if she was a paper-pusher. Plus, she was flat-on-her-ass drunk. Miyamoto could excuse a bit of misjudgment. She swallowed the rebuke, and let fly the dismissal instead.

"Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Either way I think I'll be fine," The younger woman said, leaving her beer unfinished as she moved to stand.

Ariana snatched the Agent's arm with alarming quickness, overturning the half-full glass of sherry with the sharp motion and sparing it not a bit of concern. The Admin's grip was hard and urgent,and though it would have been nothing for Miyamoto to wrench free, the haunted look that the Admin favored her with held her in place.

"Before you decide that there's nothing to concern yourself with, let me tell you a story first," She began, voice quite grave. "I've wanted to get this off my chest for years now, and somebody needs to hear it. It may as well be you." It was an old story. A dark story. One that she was hoping to forget after tonight, if at all possible.

In the past fifteen years, there had been more killing and bloodshed than in the rest of the gangs history combined, and Ariana had been there to see it all. She was thirty-nine going on forty now, and she carried the memory of many monstrous things that had shaped the team into what it was today.

Before the Madame Boss had taken over, there had been a very long and bloodless regime, where much of the conduct that was commonplace today would've been unheard of. She was old enough to remember some of that too. It had been a simpler time back then, before the expansion and the extended, merciless battles over turf. She had never, and would never speak that sort of criticism aloud, though.

This was the Boss' Team, and it's course was hers to decide. The bloodletting was on its waning phase, Arceus-willing, and she hoped that in just a few years more they might be able to put this turbulent period behind them. From there, she could move the team into mostly-legitimized profits, but until then, she served whatever ends she was put to, compliantly.

Still, the point where this had all began a decade and a half ago, stuck with her so vividly that it still came to her in nightmares every so often. The way she saw it, seniority and good service had earned her this one small breach of confidence.

Miyamoto sat back down, and as the Admin blotted up the spilled contents of her glass with a handful of napkins from a nearby dispenser, she slowly told her story about the woman in question...


	2. "A Little Girl's Grudge"

The house was an isolated inferno. A great, hellish blaze amidst the otherwise immaculate grounds of the estate, spewing meter-long gouts of flame and great rushes of ember and smoke from it's windows like the vents on an over-stoked coal boiler.

A ninety degree turn and it was all blue skies and green grasses, for hundreds of yards, framed in only by the infinity pool that played itself against the horizon line of the cape, and the ivy-covered greenhouse, that sat with dignity on the west end of the compound. When you looked that way, there was only just the smell of charred fibreglass and accelerant-soaked stucco to suggest something was amiss. Thick black smoke was only now beginning to choke out the sunlight that cast down from over the sea to the east, leaving all else as if it were part of another, more pristine world.

Ariana looked at the clock on the dash, as she pulled to a stop. It was 10:14 AM. Still mid-morning. Hardly anything went so wrong in mid-morning. She was in the business of night-time disasters. The incitement or containment of such disasters on behalf of the Team being her chief responsibility, she considered mid morning a time for the dust to settle. Yet, here they were, looking at what was a hell of a beginning to someone's very bad day.

Still, she stepped out of the car and popped the umbrella, as she pulled open the rear door of the sedan, not forgetting her due diligence. The Madame Boss did not abide sunlight, after all, however palled it might've been. Like her, the Boss was primarily concerned with nocturnal ventures, and so she hurried to provide conditions the Madame Boss was more accustomed to.

Ariana was many things for the team, and enjoyed a high standing within it's ranks, newly risen. All the same, Ariana followed the sleekly dressed young woman from the vehicle, the black parasol never leaving her hand as she played custodian to the extension of shade the Madam Boss enjoyed wherever she went, indoors or out. She understood that when you were with the Madame Boss, you were whatever she damn well desired until she no longer desired it, regardless of what your job title was, so umbrella-carrier she would be.

They drew much closer to the house-fire than Ariana might've liked, but she said nothing. Her role was to facilitate the Boss just now, not dictate where she went. She felt the heat of the blaze permeate her clothing, and warm the skin on her face uncomfortably, and she was sure that the Madame Boss felt it too, though the woman was far too poised and intense to let it show.

The gigantic house crackled and roared with the anger of a dying Heatran, parts of it beginning to buckle loudly with the snapping of ancestral timbers laid down with the great manse's construction.

"Do you know who's house this is?" The Madame Boss asked.

"Everybody knows who's house this is," Ariana answered. "They're the richest family in Cerulean City."

The Madame Boss nodded her accord and they stood there for what seemed like ages, just watching, but for what, Ariana didn't know.

"Should we be here?" The young admin cautioned after a while. It seemed like the police, or at the least the fire department might come roaring up the winding accessway that was the only means of entering or leaving the property via road.

Seeming not to hear the concern in her voice, The Madame Boss only posed a question of her own. A sharp one. "Do you know what is killing the Team?"

"Madame?" Ariana blurted, confused.

The boss was silent for a time, not moving or speaking, but then turned slightly, catching Ariana in a hard-eyed gaze. "We're fighting a war of attrition. Team Magma. Team Aqua. They're pushing us just the same as we're pushing them. Holding us back in every market we stick our noses in. If it isn't one, it's the other. We're fighting a war out here on the streets, but we're not winning it, Ariana. I asked you why."

She found it hard to respond. "W-well, because..." Ariana cleared her throat. "We're not able to oust the other teams because the League keeps supplying them with stronger Pokemon."

The Madame Boss looked away, focusing again on the burning manse. "That's not an answer. They supply us as well. Not to mention the Police."

Ariana swallowed at the rebuke, trying not to let the Boss see that she was stymied. "T-that's just it. They're perpetuating this turf-war. The League doesn't want one team to dominate Kanto, and they don't want the authority gaining too much traction, either. It's not good for them." She offered, beginning to draw up some traction. She adjusted her sweating hand on the handle of the parasol. "This way they keep us all weak. They want to diminish us in the eyes of everyone, to enhance their own legitimacy."

The Madame Boss nodded very slowly. This had been a long, hard year for the team. So many fights lost. So much wasted in the pursuit of so little, since the first big push. It was more than the acrid smell of smoldering shingles that made her want to cough. "That's a reason, I'll grant you. What I really want, however, is a solution. We can't fight the League. But how do we push the other teams out of Kanto?"

Ariana switched the umbrella into her other hand, and tried not to look as dumbfounded as she felt. She grasped at the first straw that came to mind. "We need stronger Pokemon."

The Madame Boss shook her head. "No. The League has a monopoly on strong Pokemon by design. If we procure stronger Pokemon, then so will Aqua and Magma. What we need is something different."

Ariana, at a loss, shook her head this time. "What, then?"

The fire glinted in the Madame Boss' eyes so brightly for a moment, that Ariana might've imagined that the blaze ahead was the true reflection, and that the heat and light itself actually emanated from those two dark eyes. "It starts with grudges."

Ariana leaned in a bit, thinking she'd misheard, but then the Boss went on. "We have to stop fighting their Pokemon. We need to start fighting their people. For this struggle to ever be over, we need people willing to do the ugly things. More than that, we need people willing to take this farther than just a fight. Do you understand?"

The young admin might've answered, had it not been for what happened next. Something emerged from that fire. Something truly gruesome and wrong. The sight of it stole the words from her throat.

It was so distant at first, that she'd thought maybe that it was a Pokemon of some sort that she'd never seen before, twisting and many-legged. Perhaps a fire type, she imagined, which would've explained the state of the house, but that was not the case at all.

Instead, it was two somethings-someones, more particular. One, burned and bloodied, being dragged by another, who was so shocking in appearance that Ariana nearly gasped aloud. They scuffled at the door, the relatively small size of one being balanced by the grievous wounds of the other, bringing the conflict to a standstill. The smaller seemed to win after the extended struggle, though they emerged no less battered for their efforts in the apparently mortal conflict.

When the struggle subsided, the lesser form stooped, pulling the other down burning the skeleton of a staircase by a handful of still smoking hair. The hair was red and curly and lead to a face that would've been unrecognizable but for the context clues that surrounded it.

The face, though badly burned and distorted by pain, when paired with the body which accompanied it and taken as a whole with the scene of devastation around them, simply could not belong to anyone else. It was a woman Ariana handily recognized.

Rose's elegance and demeanor was her trademark in the upper crusts of society, both inside the League and in the public eye, and those were now nowhere to be found, but it would've been harder not to believe that this twisted wreck of humanity was the heiress to the Cerulean family fortune, with all the consequential evidence piling up around her.

The smaller of the two people was a little harder to place, in Ariana's mind. She felt as though she had seen her before, but...

It hit her mind like an electrical surge. "Arceus, is that her daughter? Justicia? I thought she was sick. Some childhood leukemia thing."

The Madame Boss nodded. "A cover evidently. This is certainly not something the family wanted everyone to see." The prodigal daughter of this impressive house was a sight to behold, truly, though Ariana wished she was seeing less of it.

"Shit," the admin commented, could understand why that was something you'd want to keep under wraps.

The swollen, pregnant belly looked horrifically out of place on a girl so young, like some third world distention of the gut. Girls were getting knocked up earlier and earlier these days, but she was almost impossibly young. At her best guess, Ariana would've said that Justicia was 10, but that was just a guess. She was certainly no older than that, but something had roiled in her gut when her first instinct had prompted her toward an age shy of that number.

The sickening feeling did not lessen as the scene played out

She was dragging her mother onto the front lawn, with the obvious intention of beating her; If not to death, than it was hard to tell where. When they had cleared the circular driveway and the girl felt like she had gone far enough Justicia dropped her mother and kicked at her viciously until she lost her balance. When she righted herself again, it was only so she could dash herself to the ground without regard for her pregnancy, and fling her little fists into the hard, high cheek-bones of her mother again and again.

A child so small didn't have the power to inflict lasting damage, but she was putting down a solid case against the fact. When punches did ultimately fail her, the girl turned to clawing and scratching and gouging that her mother, wounded as she was, could not defend against.

Ariana took a step forward to stop the sickening display, but the Madame Boss held her fast by a hooked elbow. "Let it be."

Justicia's voice, they tiny voice of a child, wailed shrill and high, as she scraped at her mother's once strikingly beautiful face, the blood and the skin accumulating beneath her nails. "You let this happen! You let him do this to me!"

Oblivious to the onlookers, the woman wailed back. "I didn't know! I swear I didn't know!"

"Liar! Liar, Liar, Lia-a-ar!" Justicia screamed, "You knew! I know you knew! You knew about it and you didn't do anything! You didn't! Daddy didn't! You both knew!"

"No! That's not true! Your grandpa was a very sick man! If I had known, even before your Daddy died, I would have sent him away! Please believe me, sweetheart! I would never have let him touch you if I had known-"

"No! No! You just didn't want to do anything until grandpa died and gave everything to you! The Madame told me so! She told me the truth!" Justicia pointed at the woman in black who'd come to observe on the lawn. "She said you were too afraid to say anything, before he gave you the house and the money! You knew, but you just let it happen, because you didn't want to lose everything! You wouldn't cross him until you had everything!"

Ariana felt her eyes widen at the greater scandal alluded to in the byplay. She hazarded a glance and the Madame Boss, who didn't so much as smirk at the mention of her title. Instead, the Boss stepped very slowly and severely from beneath the parasol, approaching the scene. Ariana made to follow, but was gestured away, silently.

"Justicia, no. I-I promise!" Rose gasped, blood leaking from a wicked gash under one swollen eye. "Darling, I would never, ever just allow that happen!"

The Madame Boss spoke, and when the Madame Boss spoke, it seemed like even the burning wreckage of the estate piped down to listen. The Madame boss did not offer condemnation to the mother, but rather, added fuel to the conflagration in the young girls heart, whipping it into the frenzy that surely rivaled the fires that consumed the manse beyond.

"She whored you out to her own father. She let that disgusting old man fill you with his seed, so that she could line her own pockets, and protect her own interests. You were just a pawn to her." She hissed at the young girl in a stage whisper, loud enough for all to hear.

"I didn't know!" Rose protested, arms extended in supplication.

"She did know. How could she not know? She grew up with your grandfather, remember. She knew good and well that your grandfather was an incestuous pedophile and a rapist fiend. And do you want to know how she knew?" the Rocket Boss teased, theatrically.

"No, stop it!" Rose wailed, voice cinched tight by culminated fear and anxiety.

The tall woman knelt down so that she was even with young Justicia, speaking into her ear. "She knew because he did the same to her as he did to you. How do you think you were born?" Justicia's eyes flew wide with fresh hatred and sorrow at these words.

The Madame Boss did not stop there, however. She stoked the fire, further. "The man you think was your father was just a stand-in to protect the dignity of your family. He was wimp and a worm, and a groom of convenience to take credit for the fruit of the atrocious lusts of your grandfather. Just a shield for your mother to hide behind."

"Darling. Justicia, I-" Rose began, pitifully but was interrupted sharply.

"She played the part of concubine for so long that she must've been happy to see you take over for her! I imagine that she'd have let him breed you until your ovaries caved in, if I hadn't made sure he met with an accident for you."

There was a command that lay unspoken in the air. The Madame Boss had made good on her end of the bargain. She expected young Justicia to make good on hers. The Boss laid a hand on the young girl's shoulder and while she did not offer a weapon, or advice on how best to perform the task, when she pointed at the fallen disgrace of a woman before them, what she desired was clear.

"Show me that you'll get what you deserve," The Boss urged. "I can't take someone with me who won't stick up for themselves."

Justicia fell across her mother in a rush, wrapping her hands around Rose's throat. She squeezed tight, her thumbnails opening puncture wounds that oozed down her mother's pale neck. For her part, the heiress put up as much resistance as she could, but there was no stopping an insane fury like the one the Madame Boss had stoked in the little girl. Her daughter choked and strangled, and ignored those meager attempts to buck her off, or shove her away.

Justicia's face was purple and distorted with emotions of all kinds. Her mouth clenched in an open grimace, curses and spit trickling out as she gnashed the air between. Her eyes gushed under a knit and twisted brow, as she choked the life out of the very same person who had given life to her.

"Just-just." He mother gagged, unable to fully enunciate her daughter's name. "Ple... I love...you."

The girl screamed, lung-collapsing in length and throat-scouring in harshness. She pulled her mother toward her by the neck, her scream dying to a long shrill warble, that ended in a gasping, miserable inhale. "Stop LYING!" She croaked, slamming her mother back down into the ground with everything that her adolescent body could muster.

Rose swooned from the blow, as her skull thudded against the hard-packed earth. Her bluing lips puckered for air that would not come, and her eyes rolled slowly upward. Her limp hands trembled spasmodically and then fell into the thick grass of the grounds. The gurgling sound in her throat died, and then, staring vapidly at a sky that was half swirling black and half yawning blue, so did she.

When the deed was done, the Madame Boss stood, took off her jacket. and cast it down across the young girl who had just committed matricide. Justicia rocked back on her haunches in a low crouch, and collected the garment against herself, shielding herself from the brisk morning with everything at her disposal. She did not stand, but neither did she collapse in on herself.

She seemed to just look at it all, take it in for what it was worth. She looked at her mother who lay still on the lawn, and at the burning house that would shortly make ashes out of everything she'd ever known, and if she saw anything there that saddened her, it did not show.

In fact, more than anything else, Justicia seemed a person wholly satisfied by what she had done.

Ariana had come to understand what the Boss had meant, during the long car-ride home.

The trained Pokemon that Team Rocket used rarely pushed their fights between one another to anything that might be described as lethal, since that was how they were trained. Even those rare few that would, would almost never harm a human in more than a superficial way, much less kill one.

As for people, the Rockets were a grisly bunch, and any of them might one day find themselves a killer if the fights continued to escalate, but how many of them could do it in cold blood? How many of them could work up the gumption to end another human being, without being pushed to the brink, first? She wagered there were not many. She didn't think she could, at least.

She looked at the little girl curled up in the back seat, in the rear-view mirror.

The team needed people who could and would commit murder. And by the Madame Boss' reckoning, if they couldn't find them, they would have to make them. Whether what the Boss had said of Justicia's mother was true or false, the process had begun in just the manner she'd promised.


	3. "Just Another Regular"

Pierce was driving the car. He always drove the car. A consummate get-away man, Pierce sat like a racer even during this casual drive, one leg an extension of the accelerator, the other poised to mash on the breaks at the slightest provocation.

Pierce had never spoken much, just as he didn't now.

The man beside him however, eyes on fire with excitement, told his story without any gaps for air. Petrel sat with one knee in the leather seat, gesticulating wildly over the console at their youngest member who only seemed to care in the most vague sense about his story. "-you should have fuckin' seen it bro, six Magma heavies loaded for bare went in there, and didn't a fuckin' one of them come out. Maybe five minutes later she just comes strolling out of that warehouse, like nothing even happened."

Petrel made an expression that was a mask of emotionless calm, a rarity on his face, and wiped fingertips over his visage to emphasize this point. "Stone cold, bro. Stone cold. Shit was cray-cray, for real."

"There's a reason ol' girl wore a shield back in the day, Petrel," Tyson, awkwardly crammed between them in the back, in spite of the fact that he was the largest, commented airily. Petrel, almost universally disliked for the same enthusiasm he now exhibited, shared the front with Pierce only because Pierce wanted him in constant back-handing distance while confined to a vehicle with him.

Petrel had been assigned to him as his partner. It was not a particularly civil union, but they managed it without killing one another since all Rockets at the Agent level were expected to work in pairs. Petrel had been Justicia's partner before she'd been locked up, Miyamoto knew. Needing a new partner, the Boss had given him this one. For Pierce, this day could not have come soon enough.

Petrel nodded with a mixture of solemnity and thrill at Tyson's point but Archer quirked a brow. "Shield? You mean like the metal thing?" the young agent asked incredulously, motioning as though he were holding such device.

Everyone in the car let out a genuine hiss of irritation, realizing that Archer had spent the last three months either wondering why some Rockets wore their letter inside a shield-shaped patch on their breasts or shoulders, while others wore theirs open on their backs or chests or lapels-"al fresco" as it was called-or else had never noticed the difference.

Petrel, quick and eager to irritate, answered the implied question in typical Rocket fashion; with an insult. "Damn, bro. Are you sure you're allowed to wear that shit?" Petrel pointed at Archer's dress jumper, white with red Rocket "R" emblazoned on the left lapel, a motif played out in all their clothing to one variation or another. "You know only full Agents get to wear those, right? Yo, get this motherfucker a cardigan, or somethin'."

"Fuck you, Pet," Archer barked, but was elbowed by the immense man next to him.

"Cool it." Tyson urged, though he was sympathetic. Archer had been a Grunt for nearly three years, which was thrice the normal required time before you were allowed to wear the white flash, and be considered a fully fledged agent

Archer had been assigned to Tyson, which was a solid match, truth be told. Tyson was a veteran who could teach the well-educated but inexperienced novice all that he needed to know to survive out here in the real world. With just a nudge from Tyson, the younger Rocket fell wisely silent

Pierce, for his own form of tutelage took his right hand off of the wheel to smack Petrel so hard that his face hit the head-rest and bounced back into the teaching hand, giving him a freebie for his educational efforts. Petrel, in typical form, just ignored the blow, and kept right on rolling. "Seriously, three years and you don't even know what the shield means? The fuck did your sponsor even teach you?"

Archer didn't answer, at first, but it was mostly because he'd had enough jokes about Ariana sexing him into the Team, rather than him actually earning his emblem with hard work and effort. Everyone in the car, evidently well aware of this rumor, said nothing and pretended to be inconspicuous.

Finally, though, he seethed enough to open his mouth. "She taught me about making paper. Real paper, bitch. Something you don't know shit about, so shut your punk-ass mouth before I fuck it shut for you."

"Ah, so there's some bite left, huh? Ariana let you keep some of your teeth after all, huh? Figured she'd have busted all those motherfuckers out, so you could tongue-punch a little deeper into her pussy, really get down to the good stuff."

"'Ay, 'ay, 'ay. I said cool it!" Tyson barked, holding Archer back in his seat with an extended arm, when he surged forward.

"How do you even know what a pussy is, Pet?" Pierce asked, his monotone voice and acerbic nature making the question sound practically genuine.

"I know your mom's got one. I had to roll her fat ass in powdered sugar first and look for the wet spot, to find the motherfucker, but it was there, bro. She taught me all about that shit. " Petrel said, thumbing his goatee and popping both eyebrows obnoxiously. If this was not enough, he loaded the innuendo further by pumping his hips gratuitously.

Pierce let fly again, missed when Petrel ducked sharply, but then sucker-punched his foul-mouthed partner in the solar plexus when he sat there smirking for a beat, thinking he'd successfully dodged physical retribution. The younger Rocket let out a sound that sounded like more than a cough, but slightly less than a wretch. A final warning-shot evidently, since he wasn't hunched over weeping.

"You get the shield for doing dirty shit on behalf the Team," Tyson explained, with a gauging look at the newest member, as Petrel wheezed.

Petrel, recovering slightly, stole back the attention. "We all do dirty shit on behalf of the Team, Ty, shit. Team Rocket isn't a social club. We steal Pokemon, racketeer, deal in illegal supplements, all that shit. You get the shield for being a truly grimy motherfucker," he managed, though his voice

Pierce looked up in the rear-view mirror, at the cars sole occupant bearing such a device. Slowly but surely, everyone else's gaze fell on her as well.

Miyamoto looked back at them all, and shifted, crossing one leg over the other as best she could, crammed in beside Tyson. "Ch'yeah, grimy," she answered in a chuckle. "I guess so."

Archer, perhaps the bravest or the most ignorant, asked her the question that had surely been on his mind since she'd transferred in from the collapsed Pallet chapter. "How'd you get yours?"

She answered with silence and furrowed brow, as if the question was beneath her notice, and everyone marveled at the chilling simplicity of it.

Except Petrel.

"Yeah, how did it go down?" Petrel asked, wide-eyed and full of awe, which promptly earned him another smack from Pierce. This one was only half-hearted, because Pierce, like everyone else, was practically tilted sideways to hear her answer.

"With a heavy thud," Miyamoto offered, and shrugged. The memory was old and tired, and didn't leave her breathless anymore, but she didn't care to retell it. Once, she'd seen the spilled guts of that Aqua Admin under her eyelids when she shut them. Now, she was just tired of trying to make the story worth hearing.

Now, she hardly thought about it as more than a bizarre, lucid moment in her life, where she'd stood clutching the slick, hot blade in her gloved fingers, slowly backing away from the desperate grasps of her mark, watching him crash to the floor cradling an armful of his intestines because he hoped his life depended on it, and listening to him choke and sob when he realized how wrong he was. She'd had no real part in it other than that. She'd just stood and watched the rest of the bitter cursing and misery run its course to the end.

It seemed rather pointless in a way. She hadn't even known his name, until a few days later. Amber. A fucking girl's name. Offing that Aqua Admin had boosted her reputation within the Team immensely, but it definitely diminished the act in her own eyes, every time she had to look back and remember that the guy had such a bitch name.

She'd spilled blood for the Team more than once since, and the first time had been relatively easy by comparison to some of the others. Team-sanctioned hits were simple that way. Just a face, with nothing attached to it.

You would always remember that face, sure, immortalized as it was in the flash of fear and animalistic anger and sadness that preceded the end. That, and everything else about that moment: where you were standing, what you could hear, what the inside of your mouth tasted like, the smell of blood like a wet handful of loose change.

You would remember the adrenaline so strong and so hot that it felt like your heart was pumping lemon juice, and your scalp was on fire. You would remember the tension that made your arms feel like they would explode if you didn't move them while it cast your legs in concrete and nailed your feet to the floor.

All that and more would be captured in the minds eye with perfect clarity, but there was never anything tied to it on an emotional level. At least, there never had been for her. Not when it was for the team. The act itself became autonomous and empty. It was simple murder. No sadness. No grief. No anger, really. Maybe some detached guilt and a little more emptiness to add to all the rest, but that was it. It was nothing personal. Just someone who had to die. Garbage to be taken out.

It was when the shit got personal that things were messy. When it hit close to home, that wasn't murder anymore. That was killing, and there was a difference between a murder and a killing.

She'd done both, and she could safely say that it was always worse when it meant something. When the person you were putting in the dirt had hurt you, or wronged you, or maybe even meant something to you, and the time came when you really just had to fucking kill them to get right again, it shook the foundations, no matter who you were.

You just had to cut and stab and pop off and see what poured out on the floor from all the holes you made. That was when the demons came out and pieces of you started spinning off from the main body like a centrifuge. When it went down that way, you were killing off fractions of yourself as much as your intended victim, because to keep yourself whole you had to kill them, and the part of you that had gotten so bent out of shape about it.

Murder was simple. Easy. At times, she felt as though she could murder every second of every day, for the rest of her life if she had to, but she only had just a few more killings left in her before she was tanked. Killing was hard on the body and the mind.

"When you get a shield of your own, we can talk about it, Petrel. Till then, drop it." she expanded, not to add to the mystery but rather, to cut it off at the knees.

She mostly put up with Petrel's constant obnoxiousness because as a Rocket, he was good at what he did. That, and she found, in spite of her better judgement, Petrel's sneers and snark got her motor running in the worst sort of way. Still, she shot him a look that said in no uncertain terms that she would wrench his cock off and feed it to him in bite-sized portions if he didn't button up.

"Sorry." Tyson offered her with a dismissive grunt on behalf of the Viridian regulars. "Not enough tact to go around, among us."

The act reminded her that she was still mostly an outsider in the Viridian regulars. She'd not been assigned a new partner yet, and she was still an odd man out where the regulars of Team Rocket's home chapter was concerned.

"Hey," Petrel began with a grump, interrupting her thoughts. He thumbed his chest rapidly, but his grin was a sarcastic one. "I'm not tactless. I have a condition."

Miyamoto rolled her eyes, Pierce sighed, Tyson smirked, and Archer subtly nodded to himself as he frowned and looked out the window, as if that explained everything.

They hung a left off of Route 2 onto Old Viridian highway toward the prison.

Viridian Municipal Penitentiary was a great slab of concrete braced by arches of weathered steel that jutted painfully from the roadside like a rusted collection of staples blown up a thousand times. Fences in triplicate lined it's demarcation in the empty expanse of wilderness the highway cut through, high and lined with razor-wire enclosing all the dusty exercise yards and parking lots of austere white vans and prison buses. Their wise-assing stopped cold as the sight of it loomed closer.

Pierce drove into the side lot which was open for the purposes of releases and visitation in an overtly casual way. He parked the sedan smoothly, but he didn't seem all that willing to get out, so in that regard at least he did seem less than super-human. Or at least no more so than the rest of them.

Miyamoto had never been on the inside, but Viridian Municipal was as close as she could conceptualize to an actual hell on earth. It was one of the last places in Kanto where Magma and Aqua were still powerful, with both gangs having huge enclaves of muscle and manpower that could make things very ugly for any Rocket unlucky enough to get put inside. And that was before you even took the Jennies and all their fucking corruption into consideration.

"You, and you," Pierce pointed, indicating Petrel and Archer, the two most junior Rockets present. "Go and get her."

"And me," Miyamoto added, though not without reservation. There was a flash of anxiety that she might never leave once she'd popped open the door and stepped fully out of the vehicle. The sight of VCMP just had that effect, she guessed, but there was also the very real conflict looming ahead that compounded the feeling.

Both faded after a few strides. It was her resolve that steeled her nerves. There had to be some squaring away here, and she needed to be the one to do it, otherwise she was always going to be playing the role of number two bitch, and she couldn't have that. She needed to make it well understood that she was in charge here.

They met the exit guard at the sheet-steel and plexiglas hut at the far end of a fenced pathway that led down the edge of the north-most yard, but only stood a fair clip off, making it clear that they were waiting, and had no intention of coming closer. He nodded at them without really realizing who they were, and all three of them raised their middle fingers in a salute that was typical of Rockets wherein law enforcement was concerned. He only scoffed, as they berated him, and showed off their flash in contempt, since he was sitting pretty behind two inches of bullet-proof laminate. Eventually, growing tired of their antics, he turned and resumed his lengthy examination of a newspaper he'd been looking over previous to their arrival.

At the sound of a loud buzzer that was audible even at this distance. three people walked from the heavy security door at the far end of the enclosed pathway. Obviously inmates from the looks of their short haircuts, and the unsightly state of clothes that had been tucked into storage for years. Two took a hasty lead, while the third slowed to a stop, fishing something out of the pockets of a white coat that was slung over her shoulder.

That was their pickup.

"Justice! Hey Justice!" Petrel yowled, casting his arm back and forth like he was directing air-traffic and looking apt to race down the length of the walkway if given half a chance. The figure off in the distance lifted her head to see who it was calling her name and then, as if simply passing an acquaintance on the street, waved in one brisk motion at headheight before retrieving the item she'd been rummaging for in her pockets. Justice must've been a nickname. She resolved to use it as well, since there was no call to be formal with someone you intended to put well in their place.

Inmates from the yard watched the trio of their peers depart with their noses and fingertips protruding through the chain-link. For some of them, this was the closest they were going to get to freedom. For others, this was their last chance to threaten or berate those departing as they were paraded across the yard like an enclosed shooting gallery.

Jeering and catcalls came from those prisoners out on the yard, and the three newly released weathered them with more or less success as the walked the open corridor. The majority of the howling and anger seemed to be for Justicia, but she seemed the least affected by their attention. She tucked into the hut a distant, almost lazy third, and weaved her way through like the guard within was a leper, neither making eye-contact nor talking to him as she did so.

Once their fellow Rocket had been rustled through the checkpoint and shoved out onto the pavement in their midst, they could see what she was holding. A pack of Numel brand cigarettes that wouldn't have seemed out of place at all but for a subtle anachronism. The packaging seemed curiously different from how it was supposed to be. It was only after Justicia put one to her lips and lit it with a few persistent flicks of a beat-up looking zippo that Miyamoto was able to place it.

The pack looked strange because it was so old the packaging had been updated since she'd bought it. Those cigarettes had been confiscated from her person on the day she was incarcerated years previously. Justicia spat out the stale smoke as much as exhaling it, and whipped the practically ancient cig to the ground in distaste. "Fuck, that's awful," she remarked.

To Miyamoto's annoyance, Petrel didn't even wait to be asked. He was already digging into his jacket to offer her one of his. Justicia took it with a slightly regretful look. It wasn't her brand. "I guess that'll work," she admitted, accepting it. She lit the coffin nail and took a long drag, eyes closed and head elevated as if in divine conference.

It was obviously something only a smoker would've understood. Having never partaken, it all seemed like ritualistic drivel to Miyamoto. Still, it said some important things. Petrel was only a social smoker at best, so there was obviously a lot of respect, maybe even idolatry, there, provided she was reading it right. Miyamoto doubted it was fear. Petrel was too thick-headed to respond to the regular beatings that Pierce dished out, so she doubted Justicia fared any better at intimidating that belligerence out of him.

Miyamoto wondered how this would go, with Petrel here. She'd honestly been hoping for a more private first meeting. She decided to just watch for now.

Justicia let out a breath and then cracked a lopsided smile. Her stance loosened as she took a few more steps into the free world, and some small portion of the weight prison had mounted on her shoulders seemed to slip off. She had the look of someone who did not sleep easy, with a dark permanency to the rings beneath her eyes.

Without seeming to invest too much interest, Miyamoto tried to take a good long look at this woman.

She wasn't slight, but Justicia wasn't nearly the bruiser that Petrel's stories had made her out to be. She looked to be five-foot-four, and maybe one hundred and twenty pounds. It was hard to tell under the coat, but while she looked like she might've gotten a little use out of the yard while serving her time, she didn't seem the athletic type if only because of her smoking habit alone.

Still, Justicia seemed mostly non-threatening from where she was standing, even with the two legs of an imposing red "R" tattoo showing beneath the shirt-sleeve on her left bicep. Miyamoto stood at least four inches taller, weighed maybe fifteen or twenty pounds more, and was in as good of shape, if not better. She felt herself narrowing her eyes more and more as she went on watching Justicia finish up that cigarette.

Justicia's hair was sloppy, a typical prison chop-job, about shoulder-length, having grown some since the last cut, but not so much as to diminish it's pitiful execution. Her hair was a dull color that flirted with pink. Though Miyamoto judged her to be no older than twenty-five, it was almost certain that she'd once been a red-head, gone to gray.

Her eyes were a weathered blue and did not make her seem sharp or alert, but rather unamused and unimpressed by it all. She talked in a slightly nasal, airy way that only led her further toward the notion that Justicia was either a burnout or a lamebrain. Miyamoto smashed her lips together in silent disapproval.

"Archie?" Justicia said, after a few silent moments to herself, as if only now recognizing him. "Shit, is that you Archie?"

"Yeah, it's me." Archer admitted, bashfully,and not at all irritated by her use of his diminutive name, which he was strictly intolerant of in everyone else.

"Man, the last time I saw you, you were still a fuckin' probate, Archie. Now you're up and full blown Rocket on me!"

"Yeah-Yeah-Yeah! I'm sorry to interrupt your reunion with Bobby Big-dick over here, but seriously, what the fuck is going on?" Petrel blurted, practically shoving Archer aside. "They put your ass up for voluntary manslaughter! That's minimum six years, and we get a call from the boss to come pick you up in an hour because guess what, you're getting out today! So, yanno, what gives?"

Justicia looked at Petrel like he was an amusing distraction, which was different from how everyone else seemed to, because she didn't seem to be loading up a punch while she did it. " "Parole, Pet. They're letting me out early for good behavior. Forty-two months to the day."

"Shee-it. Now I've heard everything. Good behavior? You?" Petrel asked, before blowing out a raspberry.

"Yeah. Didn't anyone tell you?" Justicia slapped both hands together palm to palm in front of her chest, one finger arched to hold her cigarette, before continuing in a falsetto. "I found Arceus and I was saved by his divine Judgment." She followed up the display with a roll of her eyes, and a long drag.

"Now I really have heard everything! But hey, I got something for that. It's called cheap booze, and meaningless sex. I won't tell the chaplain if you wont."

Justicia snorted, driving smoke out of her nostrils into Petrel's face. "I'll take the booze. Big pass on the meaningless sex, Pet."

Petrel didn't even notice the dismissal. "Alright, alright. You drive a hard bargain. I'll do my best to make the sex as meaningful as possible, but you gotta understand, I'm a free spirit, Justice. I just can't tie down all this goodness at one Ponyta-hitch, okay? I go where the wind takes me."

Miyamoto found herself fuming a bit at Petrel's obvious propositioning, but locked that down before it crept into her expression.

Archer, still feeling the sting from the Petrel's comments in the car, took his opportunity to interject and snorted. "Yeah, if the wind takes you well clear of all the gash you've ever made a pass at, I agree."

Justicia chuckled mildly at the assertion, and waved away both of the male members of her welcoming party, to finally lay eyes on Miyamoto, whom she'd previously failed to notice at all-a purposeful oversight, Miyamoto was sure.

She looked speculative at first, glancing up and down from Miyamoto's red-laced heavy boots to the very peak of her stark white jacket and jet black mock-neck, but did not allow herself to show more than vague interest in the face above it. Instead, she gave it a questioning look. Not a "Who are you?" but instead more of a "What is this?"

Justicia grunted in the same way she had with Archer and Pet. "You're the favorite, aren't you?"

They called Miyamoto that because she was. There wasn't even any point in arguing it anymore. The Madame Boss had even reprimanded her own son for not being more like Miyamoto, calling her "The Ideal Image of Team Rocket."

She jutted her chin. "I must be, if you've already heard about me."

Justicia frowned a bit, as if in appraisal. Miyamoto opened her mouth to address the unspoken issue at hand with suitable bravado, but Petrel, who leapt in to diffuse the situation without invitation, stuck out his thumb toward the woman behind him. "Miyamoto's a Viridian Regular now."

Somehow Miyamoto got the impression that he was just trying to clarify, not insult her intentions, but that hardly made the offhanded comment any less crass to her hearing off it. Still, as much as she wanted to choke him, she couldn't. If she made it seem as though that assertion were not correct, and that she was in fact, something more than just "one of the crew", she would seem vain, or worse, insecure. She bit the inside of one cheek, and exhaled slowly.

Unlike her, Justicia did not simply let the matter drop. "We'll see," she said with a shrug, drilling in an obvious dig. Justicia made severe and lasting eye-contact with the other Rocket Agent, eyes glinting, before she allowed herself to be directed back to the car. For her part, Miyamoto was left standing there, wondering if the confrontation could've ended more poorly.

She set her teeth together behind closed lips and followed behind at a moderate distance. Best not to react now, she reminded herself. Save it for a better time.

Somebody was about to be thrown out of the car to make room for Justicia, she realized, as they returned to the lot, and it had nearly been decided that Archer, as the most junior, would be the one surrender his spot. Miyamoto weighed being ousted from the car against the discomfort of spending a whole car ride with this new, unprecedented problem and considered offering Archer her own spot. In the end, she just offered to accompany him. "C'mon, Archer," she said, giving his sleeve a pull. "I'll ride with you."

Archer nodded, and they watched the black sedan full of friends and rivals putter off down the dusty road without comment. Archer called for the taxi, since that was his place as her junior. She'd paid him the respect of not forcing him to go alone, and so it was the least he could do to handle the mundane details that most Rocket agents of her stature would have regarded as infra dignitatem.

Brotherhood and Respect were core principles of Team Rocket, and so she supposed that this event hadn't been a total loss. Archer respected Justicia, that much was obvious, but if she, like the rest of the Viridian regulars continued to treat him as what he was, all the better. She would continue to show a more reserved contempt for his junior status than her peers, which to him would seem like love by comparison. Archer, naturally, would grow closer to her because of it.

They were both relative newcomers to the Viridian Chapter, the mother chapter of Team Rocket, but both of them were well-connected, and in Archer's case, possessed of potential that had not yet been tapped. It was good to have strong rapport with someone like that.

Archer smiled at her, obviously alluding to the brush-off that Justicia had given her when he asked if she was "All good?"

She didn't nod, but only popped her eyebrows as if she didn't understand what he was driving at. She had resolved to bring Archer in close, but she wasn't about to wear her heart on her sleeve. "I'm always good."

Archer's smile faded, but he saved face to some extent by nodding affirmatively. "Yeah."

Miyamoto smirked. "How about you, Archer? Are the Regulars everything you expected?"

Archer betrayed a small frown, but gave the answer she'd have expected to hear of Ariana's young protegé. "It doesn't matter. This opportunity is for the team, not for me." Archer was young, and he still had that team creed pumping in his heart, so that answer didn't surprise her at all.

Miyamoto grinned, seeing it for the canned response that it was, though. "It'll get easier."

Archer nodded, but stuck to his guns. "I can handle it."

"Even Petrel?"

Archer turned away from her, watching down the street as if waiting for the cab to appear already, but not fast enough to completely hide the expression of distaste. "Especially Petrel."


	4. "Like Animals"

There was a welcoming party going on at HQ when they returned. The structure had once been a nightclub during the booming days before recession had hit Viridian, and it still looked a lot like that on the inside, even though now it had been mostly sectioned off into rooms and offices, and the nightlife in Viridian had withered and died, leaving behind no need for such a place. Still, all of the furniture in the massive central foyer had been shoved out to the darkly-colored walls, to make room for a large table and assortment of chairs that in no way matched one another.

The Regulars lined it on all sides, and even a few members from Vermillion and Olivine stood between them or sat further away. She even recognized the two agents that had been put in charge of the Game Corner, a casino front for the team expansion in Celadon. Atilla and Hun. The Profit Expansion Division, they called themselves, which was maybe a little pretentious, but they were good at their jobs in spite of their almost laughable relative youth.

Zager, who'd once been called Crazy Zager for his radical money-making ideas, stood near the head of the table. The reason nobody called him Crazy anymore was because the man was now a major force behind the team's largest legitimate front, a tech startup in Saffron called Silph Research and Development. His thick black moustache twitched as he carried on an unheard conversation with the individual to his left, the prodigal son, Giovanni.

Miyamoto had never cared for Giovanni, truth be told. He thought he was too big for the status quo of the Team. He thought that the Team needed new direction, and he was the one to give it, with his big fancy Pokemon U degree. He didn't understand that the team would never condescend to follow some college boy who'd never gotten his own hands dirty in his life.

She hid her frown. At least Giovanni being here meant that the Madame Boss wouldn't be, and for that she was thankful. Miyamoto wasn't sure she could deal with that additional layer of pressure just yet.

Mother and son had grown to detest one another in the worst of ways, since Giovanni had returned from his studies abroad and while everyone owed allegiance to the Madame Boss, somehow they all managed to dance the delicate dance required to show them both the proper respect and not take a side in the obvious infeud. Perhaps it was even some effort on their part that made it all come together, as they seemed to make their offset appearances in uncanny synchronicity.

Giovanni seemed quite at ease around Justicia, who sat at the head of the table, it's occupant of honor. That did distress Miyamoto a bit, but that hardly represented a disturbing revelation. There was more than enough contempt shared between Giovanni and herself, largely because she was so far into the Madame Boss' camp, so she assumed there must be those on the other side of the situation.

Ariana was there too, standing in close confidence with Archer. If there was any camaraderie built between them by last night's storytelling, the Admin did not show it. She didn't so much as nod at Miyamoto when they made eye-contact over Archer's shoulder.

She sat herself at the table, boldly close to Justicia and opposite of Petrel. She knew that there was no sense in avoiding Justicia or this homecoming party, since it would just make her look like she was jealous and weak. Instead, she took up a drink and a smile, and wedged herself into the conversations around her either by charisma or by force.

She listened to Petrel talk about all the girls he'd fucked, and the cash he'd folded, which was a conversation that went on for hours, it seemed. There was no substance to it, really, at least not as far as she could tell, but they all kept on listening, simply because he sold it with the gift of gab.

She listened to Tyson talk about all the fights he'd won, and lost, and emerged from with barely his life. He pointed to scars, some new, that Justicia was only now learning of, and some old, which he and Justicia recanted together, with something like nostalgic fondness.

She listened to Archer talk about overseas venture markets that were ripe for investment, and how the domestic government was making a grave error so tightly controlling the importation of pokemon-related goods. His was the least engaging of the conversation, but Miyamoto made an effort to seem interested, all the same.

Pierce, like her, only listened. He was a firm believer in the opportunistic nature of a well-placed silence. He heard, but he pretended not to hear until he was spoken to.

Justicia, who didn't tell much of her stay in VCMP, drank heavily. Doubly so, whenever the conversation strayed in that direction.

In fact that was the one constant for all of them. For hours, they kept pouring back drinks, and for those of them who were so inclined the imbibing turned to harsher things: pills smashed under the thick bases of lowball glasses, lines of white snorted off of the bare table. The mood grew somehow heavier, more dense as the ride-in guests, and even local well-wishers including Giovanni and Ariana made their gradual yet inevitable exits, and all that remained were the Regulars.

And still, the drinking went on, for hours more. Tidal waves of amber and astringent clear liquor gushing down wide-open and abused throats to the cavernous stomachs below, already awash with the stuff. The clock spun on, unnoticed as it seeped into their bloodstreams and did it's devastating work.

A more lucid state of inebriation found Miyamoto in the midst of it all, and she took rapid inventory, sitting upright as best she could, as if waking from a daydream. She felt groggy and not at all herself.

Pierce, one hand splayed across the side of his head, slowly worked a pocket lighter over and over and over on it's edge against the table, cigarette dangling limply from his bottom lip as he kept on listening and saying nothing.

Archer, long since passed out, reclined deeply in a folding chair, legs propped into another vacant chair beside him, face ablush from consumption.

Tyson, his huge and gruff personality peeled away, warbled at Justicia, voice choked with emotion. "I really missed you! I thought the regulars would fall apart without you!" he moaned, mostly ignored by everyone around him, as most alcoholic lapses of integrity are, either out of shame or disgust.

Petrel was in his element, still doling out stories that got ruder and cruder as he went on. "-And so I told her, darling, your pussy might look like an open-faced jam sandwich with whiskers, but you've got the best damn looking hemorrhoids I've ever seen."

Miyamoto groaned, just like everyone else at the table who was still cognizant enough to hear the disgusting anecdote.

"You're a fucking animal, Pet," Justicia commented in a way that was mostly uncomplimentary. She, perhaps more than any of them was cognizant and alert, and it was not because she'd taken in any less than the rest of them.

Miyamoto had been careful to match her swallow for swallow, but even beyond that Justicia had been weathering the same nose-blizzard as Petrel, and mashing the same downers into her drink as Pierce who sat at the end of the table, head as heavy as all the injustice in the world. Maybe it was the cocktail formed by all those things that had her looking so balanced.

Petrel, eager and edgy as he was, smiled at the words he believed to be praise, and blathered on. What little reservations he had were demolished by the stimulant and depressant buzz.

"I could show you how much of an animal I am," he offered, the most recent in a string of come ons that he'd produced to Miyamoto's ever-increasing dismay. A dismay that she was getting worse and worse at hiding, and that Justicia had surely begun to notice.

Justicia had noticed.

The party's guest of honor swallowed out a mouthful of vodka and hydrocodone that tasted worse than mouthwash, and had only the sole virtue of getting her extremely fucked up to make up for that. She'd been sitting through Petrel's asinine shit for a while now, if only for the sake of driving a point across, and it was time to drop the other shoe already. "Alright, fine, you little pussy. Let's do it. Let's fuck. You and me. Right now," she contested, shoving her glass aside and turning to face the disgusting shithead face-front.

Petrel's eyes grew wide for a moment, but then he smirked, smooth confidence flattening it all out into simple amusement. "Alright-"

"But first, I want you to take your dick out right here in front of everyone. If you're such a fucking man, then lets see it, here in the open, Pet." Justicia said, setting her finger on the table.

This was when the facade broke, and everything about what was happening took on an eerie quality, like it was part of some stage rehearsal, where the characters were not in costume, but their lines were delivered with the utmost of sincerity, and Petrel, the lead player of this vignette, tried to consult his script to no avail.

"W-what?"

"You heard me. I didn't fucking stutter." Justicia assured him, stare boring holes in Petrel as he backpedaled, eyes flashing to someone who might bail him out. Miyamoto caught that pleading, bewildered look for just a second, before the tyrant at the head of the table stole it again.

"No, don't look at her." Justicia barked. "I'm the one who's gonna fuck you. Take that dick out, Petrel."

There were many long, sour seconds of silence before Petrel, manhood in question sucked in a measure of courage and oxygen, and did as pride demanded he do. He unzipped his pants, and fished about within, before producing the appendage in question. He straightened, trying not to let the offering seem modest in light of the circumstances.

Justicia made no outward indication of whether not it was. Instead she polished off her drink, and slammed it down so hard that Archer woke with a start. A type of alchemy seemed to have taken place finally, as all the drink in the woman's gut finally peeled away the personable exterior, revealing the person that lurked within to Miyamoto's sight at long last.

Justicia's voice lost it's humored, airy quality, becoming a low growl. "All of you, get the fuck out." She said clearly and forcefully. "Now."

Miyamoto couldn't have said what propelled her outward with the others. Tyson started corralling Archer along, and Pierce began lanking and loping slowly behind, but there was a swirling sense of disgust and betrayal that was both enhanced and stifled by her drunkenness that got her on her own feet.

She found that she could do nothing, as she left the room, offer no protest nor complaint, because to do so, she would admit that she was having something taken from her, or that she objected. She wouldn't do that. She left, seeming as light as air, but inside she was screaming.

Petrel and Justicia stood alone in the room after it was vacant, her weathering his lascivious pawing only so far. She'd taken off her flash when she'd come in, and he unbuttoned her short-sleeve black blouse with urgency, swooping in to suckle at her neck and shoulders as though she were some punch-drunk highschool girl who'd spread her legs willing and wet for him, or else a whore who would let him believe that was the case for the right price.

She did not turn her head aside invitingly. She did not press herself against him. She didn't stop him, either, but she was not his lover.

He groaned against the crux of her neck. "I always had the biggest fucking wood for you, Justice. Ever since I joined the Regulars."

She took a drink and a drag over his shoulder as he fondled her through her penal-issue brassiere, "I thought you wanted to fuck, not tell me about your feelings."

He seemed not to care for the rebuff, but instead redoubled his efforts, peeling away her clothing and going straight for what he was after, as promised. Even with her pants bunched around her ankles, Justicia's entrance resisted him in the way the rails of an old window swell to fit their jambs. Almost four sexless years had taken it's toll on her.

Still, she snickered at his attempts to pierce his way in, adjusting his hips awkwardly, changing his angle of attack manually, even going so far as to spit on his hand and diddle around like a porn-star, to no avail. It had gone over a minute now, and she could see he was beginning to wither.

"Been a long time, huh?" Petrel offered, as though offering guidance concerning the problem.

She puffed the last few millimeters of tobacco before the filter on her cigarette, and blew a hot jet of smoke in his face. "You're not really doing much to get me wet."

In a huff, he stepped back. "Well, what would help?!

She sneered, as if she'd only been waiting to ask, and Ashed out her cigarette on the bare wood of the table before reaching for his spittle covered hand. She cupped it, and curled his fingers over, pressing the tips into his palm. With great diligence, she tucked his thumb over the assemblage so that he was making a tight fist. When she was done, she peeled off her shirt the rest of the way, and nodded, as if she were prepared.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Petrel asked, fully confounded. He held his hand up, as if he were interrogating it. "There's no way this is going to fi-"

She shook her head, and made an aggravated sound. "No, you're not doing it right. Curl it up tight. Bring it back about to here." She showed him what she meant, bringing her own fist back to waist level. "Like this."

Confused, he mimicked her motion. She snarled with satisfaction when he'd done it correctly. "Now punch me in the stomach."

"W-what?" Petrel warbled in confusion

Justicia sighed. "I said, ball your fucking fist up, and punch me with it. Right in the gut." She set her hands fingertip to fingertip in a circle above her lower abdomen, as if drawing a target. "C'mon you little bitch. Right here. Like you mean it."

"I-I can't, Justice, I-"

"Don't pussy out, now, Petrel. This is the only chance you're ever gonna get."

"I don't think-"

"See, this is why I don't believe any of those bullshit stories. You'd have to have some fucking balls first. Are you gonna fucking hit me, or do I have to tell everyone that you were too big of a bitch to fuck me when I was the one asking for it?"

His first punch was timid, slow, backed only by his fear and irritation with her threats and insults. It was scarcely a punch at all, and she told him so. "Oh come the fuck on, faggot. Either punch me or walk away. Don't bullshit around-"

The second one was stiffer, more angry, and caught her between exhale and inhale. Her diagphragm bounced upward, forcing the last part of her sentence out as a loud "Uhnf!"

Recovering, she smiled wickedly. "That's close. You still hit like a highschool girl, though."

He hit her again, and this time she braced for it. He'd leaned into the blow, and she was sitting on the edge of the table, leaving nowhere for the energy to dissipate to. Dispite her preparation, she doubled over, spit flying from her mouth.

Without a missed beat, Justicia sprang upright again, eyes gleaming. She wiped her hair back out of her face. "That's it? Come on. Archie could punch me harder than that. Do I need to call him in here so he can show you how-"

She hollered in pain when the next punch came in high, under her ribs, much more sharply than before. A cluster of nerves leaked fire under her skin in all directions but as soon as she could gulp in enough air, she prodded him onward. "Harder! Fuck, this is getting me so wet."

To demonstrate the truth of her statement, she reached down between her legs, and withdrew two glistening fingers, wiping them across his snarling lips. "Too bad I'm starting to have second thoughts about fucking a limp-wristed little queer like you."

His next blow, misaimed, cracked against her hip and sent a numbness down to her knee. Her groan was a mixture of pain and elation. "That's it. Keep going until I fucking cry. I get so damn horny when guys beat the shit out of me. Too bad there aren't any around."

He gave her a combination, left-right-left, each punch dead center on her navel, where a swollen bruise was beginning to form. Involuntary tears did well in her eyes, but she kept at him. She lifted her hands from where they'd braced her weight against the tabletop, and put them on Petrel's shoulders. He ankles hooked behind his knees, her touch desirous.

"Oh, shit," Justicia gasped, as if she were already on the verge of orgasm. "One more. All I need is one more, and I'm there," she pleaded.

One more was all she needed, but she didn't need it to be fully welcoming, as Petrel might've hoped. Her grip on him wasn't to ease their copulation either, but more to ensure he could not wrench free.

When his fist pushed into Justicia's stomach, up came everything contained therein. Hot and roiling, the vomit seemed to explode from her throat like a geyser, splattering against his neck, and his chest. Every drink she'd drank, every pill she'd swallowed, even the last meal she'd been served in prison, all thinned down to a milky off-yellow soup that reeked of ethanol and bile. It trickled down in runny globules until it dripped from the tip of his cock like thickened piss.

His erection sharply curbed, Petrel was beginning to look like he was packing an over-boiled link of boudin rather than the hard salami he'd been boasting of earlier in the night.

Not quite finished yet, Justicia guffawed and kicked him hard in the sopping groin with both legs as he recoiled. The blow was hard enough to lift him off the floor, and she was already mocking his sharp gasp of pain by the time he fell into the chair he'd occupied previously, cupping his ball-sack like a pair of busted eggs. " Aw, what's the matter, you don't like the rough stuff?"

She collected her brassiere, and hoisted her pants back up in a brisk motion, before setting to work on buttoning back up her blouse. When she was done Petrel was still moaning, his eyes just now beginning to crack open against the pain. He gave her a plaintive look, and she shrugged. "If you can still get hard after that I'll swear I'll suck your cock until my face turns white, puke-dick and all."

The chastened Rocket whimpered miserably.

"No? What a shame." She wiped her mouth and chin with one hand, and rubbed that on a clean expanse of Petrel's jacket. When she was done, she crouched down beside him, with a merciless glare. Her voice became low and hard again, and all hint of humor evaporated.

"I don't ever even want to hear you imply that you were man enough to fuck me. You really don't want to know how deep this Bunneary hole goes, Pet. Anyone asks about what happened in here, you tell them nothing." Justicia coached him, without blinking. "We had a discussion, and after you had a change of heart we came to a new and complete understanding. Am I being clear?"

Petrel nodded rapidly.

She nodded as well, as if to agree that they were finished, but then suddenly Justicia grabbed him by a handful of his hair, and pulled his head sideways to speak directly into his face. "And I'm only going to fucking tell you this once, so listen to me when I say this: You are out of line. I don't know why none of the guys ever kicked your ass back into shape, but I am here now, and I promise that you will straighten your shit out and start acting like a professional or you and I will have an altercation that will make you wish this was the worst thing that I had ever done you."

She stood straight, and waved him off. "Now get your sorry ass out of here and clean yourself up." Justicia let him crawl away and sat back down at her seat. That was two flying-types with one stone, as the saying went, which certainly made for an efficient first day home.

Still, she reasoned, hefting a half-full fifth of whiskey from the table and putting it to her lips, she had a lot of drinking to make up for, and not a whole lot of night left to do it in.


	5. "A Plan in Motion"

Miyamoto's anger was like the molten core of the earth, as she stood outside. She felt as though she might bake a portion of the concrete that surrounded her feet by force of presence alone, but the Rocket showed nothing in her face. She'd once had a notorious streak of hot-headedness, but Miyamoto had learned as a child of Castelia to bottle her fury, and avoid the beatings that loud-mouths got from those that were bigger and stronger than them, so it was hardly a feat of willpower that kept her looking so placid. Rather, it was almost second nature at this point of her adult life.

She nodded subtly to Tyson in farewell, while she wrestled with that solar rage at the same time, punching it, smashing it down like she were packing overmuch luggage, to stowing it away. When it was fully contained, she walked home, still managing to leave the clubhouse long before Petrel came creeping out of the same door, clutching a bag of ice to his groin and hoping desperately that Pierce was still around to give him a ride home, so that he wouldn't have to take his sportbike.

Home for Miyamoto was an upscale, but mostly unfurnished condominium on the eighteenth floor of high-rise complex, some fifteen blocks away. The walk helped to sober her up some. The doorman was sharply dressed and courteous to her as he always, when she stepped into the entryway. She boarded the austere aluminum elevator, and marched down the maroon-carpeted hallway to her door. Her's was heavy aluminum-backed teak, last on the left and picked solely for it's name: 18R.

When she got inside, latched an ensemble of locks behind her and stomped off her heavy boots, she did not go to sleep, or sit and consider her day, or fume about her situation. Instead, she went into her kitchen, where all the appliances save one had sat untouched since she'd taken over the lease, and put on a pot of coffee.

It was time to work.

She stood against the sink in the kitchenette, arms folded until then coffee was done, then she took a seat at her desk, which sat in the middle of an otherwise empty and undecorated living space. From it, she produced a tablet of paper and some pencils, a sewing kit, a measuring tape and several swatches. She spread them out in front of her until she found some that seemed appropriate, and then began a rough sketch after scraping the remainder of the cloth back into a shallow, open drawer.

For this, she would need a disguise. Wearing disguises was not something that Rockets seemed to do, being that they were so proud of their flash and colors, which was nomenclature for the white regalia and red letters they all wore to denote gang membership. Miyamoto had a flourish for it, however.

It was latent talent that had followed her from her days as a gutter-baroness in Castelia. There wasn't much charity to go around in the streets of Unova's Capital city, and people fought for every scrap of it, so what better way to get more than her fair share? It was easier living three slightly miserable lives than one incredibly miserable one.

Of course, there had been those that had copped wise, eventually, but they got the sharp end of a short knife in their backs. That too, was something that had followed her, as Justicia would find out soon enough.

She stood to measure herself, starting at the shoulders and ending at the thigh, noting the results as she went. The leg measurement was less crucial, as she could always cut and hemn later and in truth she knew the results she would get anyway. A good disguise was in the visible details, however, and a little meticulousness went a long way.

She had enough material to begin most of the garments she would require tonight, but some of the accoutrement would need to be purchased or collected. She began on a long, black jacket with buttons of gray plastic that she fished from another drawer filled with little sub-dividers. Her cuts were neat and precise, and she fastidiously collected the unused portions and loose thread for later use. Miyamoto sewed by hand in the same way she had learned without any assistance from a machine. She was fast enough without it, and she didn't see the need to complicate her process with a hulking device that would otherwise arrest a portion of her workspace.

She didn't move for hours, except to nimbly push and sharply pull at the needle and thread. It was only when she turned the garment inside out to conceal the ugly chartreuse-colored brocade fabric lining and examine it, that she realized how much time had elapsed. Nearly the whole night had gone by, with the morning sun shearing through the slat blinds on the window, sub-sectioning the room with razor-thin bars of pale blue.

She strode to her bedroom and hung the jacket in her closet, without trying it's fit. The walk-in was the only reasonably occupied space in her home. She kept it well-stocked with the sort of flexible ensembles that allowed her to exercise her craft, but also, she did not deny herself the small luxuries and vanities that a well-paid woman like herself could enjoy. A jewelry box stuffed with items, some pilfered, but most purchased sat over a shoe organizer that was stuffed three sets to a shelf at the far end of the closet.

Smiling, she slipped out of her clothes and stretched, but not in preparation of sleep. Instead, she pulled a few articles of clothing out of the closet and flung them onto the well-made bed, and took a shower, in the adjoining bathroom.

When she was clean and refreshed, she slipped into casual clothes, and left her apartment to begin the day, which started with a call. She kept no phone, and was always careful to walk a fair piece from her building before stopping at a payphone.

"Tyson," she said into it, after it rang ten times, and a weak voice hissed it's disbelieving hello across the line. "Breakfast?"

There were a number of expletives which followed the request.

"Hungover?" Miyamoto scoffed. "Gimme Archer's number then."

Her second call was more fruitful, but it was only because she forced it to be. "Archer," she began, this time more forcefully, "where are you?"

He made the mistake of telling her in a whisper that sounded every bit as trashed as Tysons, and twice as pitiful by comparison. She hung up the phone on him, and was at the Noctowl Motel in 15 minutes, and pounding on his door. He came to the door in his jacket and boxer-briefs, barechested and pantsless. "What is it?"

Without a word, she pushed past him, and looked around, as if she were searching for something incriminating.

He moaned. "Arceus, Miyamoto, what are you doing?"

She chuckled. Honestly she'd been hoping to catch Ariana draped sweaty and breathless across the rented bedsheets like a well-used hooker, but alas, his room was empty, save him and a television silently pumping softcore pornographic cinema into the dead space between beige papered accent-walls.

She spun in place, pretending he'd only just now appeared, "Can you blame me for wanting to see if the rumors were true?" she remarked, voice thick with sarcasm, of which she felt none. She knew good and well Archer was bagging that old bitch, but it was her little secret to hold on to, for when the time was right.

Archer, as expected, frowned, but she snagged his pants by the leg, and slung them at him from where he'd left them tossed over the arm of a nearby chair. They hit him across his face, and he groaned again, clutching his head.

"Get dressed so we can have breakfast," Miyamoto insisted. "C'mon, it'll help your hangover."

"The only thing that is going to help this hangover is a lobotomy," Archer insisted, though he did as she requested, with only moderate complaint.

They took breakfast at a nearby truck-stop, which Archer evidently had become quite familiar with during his tenancy at the seedy hotel. The younger Rocket, for his part, ordered a plate of home fries and a glass of orange juice with toast, loading up on the carbohydrates, at Miyamoto's direction, while Miyamoto herself ordered extensively from the a-la-carte section of the menu until she was satisfied.

While Archer politely ate his breakfast, chewing slowly behind a bunched napkin, with all the mastered niceties of a true upper-class Viridianite, she mashed her eggs-over-easy under the tines of her fork until they were slivers of oily white in a soppy yolk soup, then attacked the messy substance with the half-moon remainders of her cornmeal mush, once she'd bitten the tender centers out.

It was an overwhelming display, she imagined. Kantonese women were typically expected to be delicate and reserved in their appetites, as she understood it, but she didn't come from a place where a chance at a meal sat still long enough for a person to set out eight different utensils and tuck a napkin into their collar. She smirked with greasy lips, after folding a slice of bacon into her mouth like an accordion.

"So," she began, without a real preamble around the mouthful of fried pork-fat. "Can I ask you something?"

Archer blew out a long sigh, and then set his fingers on the edge of the table. "For the last time, no, I didn't get sexed in to the Team. I paid my dues just the same as everybody-"

Miyamoto snickered, taking a huge gulp of milk to wash back her meal. "Not about that," she explained. "Honestly Archer, I don't give a damn if you took a dump in the perfect shape of an R when you were a baby, and Ariana knew you were the next Rocket fucking Messiah. You're in the Team now, and that's all that matters."

His demeanor softened, and Miyamoto had to wonder why Archer hadn't been her first choice.

She had called Tyson first because she had dirt on him that she could use for leverage. It was nothing severe, of course. Tyson was a Rocket through and through, but he had his share of indiscretion that she'd found out about through various conversations since coming to Viridian. They wouldn't get him into any serious trouble, but she was certain he didn't want word of them spread around if he could help it.

Archer, however, she could maneuver without needing to coerce. He was young and impressionable, and she'd shown him far more consideration than the other's had. He would fit perfectly into her plans and she wouldn't even need to destroy the rapport she'd built. If anything, she might even increase it.

"Will you tell me about what it was like when you were a Grunt?" She asked, genuinely inquisitive, pounding down the last half of her drink.

All Rockets began their careers in a probationary period where they were known as Grunts. During this time they were essentially the lowest common denominator. No more than slaves and servants to whatever whim or request that those who'd claimed the right to wear the flash and color placed upon them. They didn't speak unless spoken to, and their opinions meant less than shit. They were, in all measurable capacities, exactly what they were called.

Of course, just what this term of indentured servitude actually meant depended on who selected you for introduction. Your sponsor was the one who put your name forward for probationary membership, and that made a huge difference in the nature of your assignments as a Grunt.

Ariana, a high-ranking admin, who'd once had a history of being the Madame Boss' own enforcer and liaison, now spent her days entangled in the money-making ventures of the Team's legitimate fronts, so it made sense that Archer's tasks would be more facilitative of those sorts of needs than her own had been. Archer had spent a long three years minding files and phones, making calls and setting up meetings instead of cutting deals and taking the fight to rival Teams out here on the streets like the rest of them. It made sense that Ariana had withheld his full membership for so long.

On the other hand, Miyamoto had been sponsored by the Madame Boss herself, and her own duties as a Grunt had been bloody and rapid, spanning only five months from the occasion of her sponsorship to the day she'd enjoyed full membership. The tasks she had been set to were honestly not all that different from the sort of thing she did now, save for the fact that she was allowed to enjoy the bit of status that came with them.

Miyamoto didn't talk about her life as a Grunt, as was typical of most Rockets, but she wondered if Archer would talk about his.

It was a very ritualistic thing, the transition from Grunt to Agent. Like pupae into imago, the Rocket that emerged from their probationary periods were so unlike what they had been before, that they often saw need to distance themselves from that time, not just temporaneously, but physically and spiritually as well. For this reason, many Rockets, like herself, set fire to their old Blacks, the so-called Grunt probationary uniforms that were named for the sable silhouette they gave their wearers, on the day they were given their flash and color.

There was even something of a legend within the Team, that in days of old, before the Madame Boss had taken over, probates had been required to eat their old clothing, down to the last stitch and button, and were not considered full Rockets until they had found a way to do so to the satisfaction of their sponsor.

The younger agent only shrugged his shoulders. "Not much to tell. I handled a lot of the bookkeeping for the Celadon expansion. Some stuff for this tech company they're trying to start in Saffron, too. I'd have probably done another year as a probate if the Pallet expansion had taken off, so..." His voice tapered off when he realized who in particular he was talking to, but he finished up with a sort of off-smile, and tilted his head to one side. "Why do you ask?"

It was research of a type, really. She wasn't sure how much of it to let Archer in on just yet, but there was no harm in being frank. "You ever drive anyone around? For the boss, I mean."

"Well, yeah, sure. Lots of times. Drove that big armored land-yacht for about a year, actually."

Miyamoto smiled, genuinely. "What was that like?"

And so she sat and listened for a good long while, at some of the tales Archer had to tell. They were mostly uninteresting affairs, but she gleaned from them the important parts. She listened to the hows and the whys and the whens, and she filed them away in her mental rolodex for later assembly.

When Archer was done, she knew everything there was to know about how a Grunt would be expected to behave when he drove around his betters. She knew how and when to open and close a door for a passenger and when it was best to stay at or below the speed limit for the sake of going unmolested by the road authority. She knew what sort of things to say to someone who had requested a pickup, and she knew what sort of things to say to someone who the Boss had requested be picked up as well as the very severe difference between the two.

When they parted ways, and Archer paid for the meal, as was his place in things, Miyamoto sat back in the booth and extrapolated upon what she'd learned. By her best estimate it would take her three more days of work to put everything into place. At least two more nights of sewing and cutting, and perhaps one more meeting with Archer, wherein she would ask for a favor that would help cure the glue that held this plan together. It was not essential, but beneficial enough that it merited the extra time. That particular meeting couldn't happen too soon, of course, or even Archer would begin to wonder what exactly she was up to. He was naive, but not a moron.

Three more days and her plan would be complete. Three more days and then she would get Justicia separate from the rest of the Regulars and make it quite clear why she was the one in charge here. Three more days and that one would fall in line, well chastised, just as Miyamoto had promised.


	6. "Nothing Important"

Justicia sat slowly, tensing in the middle until the felt the cushiony armchair envelope her. Petrel, as much as she had protested otherwise, had really banged her up. There'd been a little pink amongst the neon-yellow liquor-piss in the bowl this morning and it felt like her abdomen was one solid bruise from ribcage to pelvic bone. She tried not to let it show in front of the boss, though.

The Madame Boss didn't fall for the ruse. "It's not good for a woman to let herself get so out of sorts, Justicia."

Jusitica only nodded.

"How are you adjusting?"

Justicia shrugged. "Fine."

"Do you know why I asked you to see me?"

Justicia nodded again. "The deal."

The Madame Boss nodded, disdainfully. "The deal."

* * *

They had come in, without a sound. Six of them, no trouble with the locked door, or the guard behind it; obviously on Magma payroll. Her last night, just ten hours away from release, and here they stood, jarring her quietly from sleep with a slight kick to the bed frame.

It would have been pointless to yell, and she knew it.

* * *

There was a long silence in the room, with both of them saying not a word, but in that span the air seemed to become heavier. "You understand why?" asked the Madame Boss

* * *

A piece of angle-iron that had been scraped against concrete until it sharp as a razor was held before her face, reflecting the smiling teeth just beyond it. "Wake up, bitch. It's your going-away party." A quick slice across her shoulder had provoked her into a sitting position.

"Easy, Finch, we can't cut her up too bad. We're not supposed to kill the little Rocket cunt, remember! That's not part of the deal."

"Heh, yeah. We just came to have a little fun is all."

* * *

Justicia, again, only nodded. "Wouldn't have survived otherwise." That much at least, she supposed was true.

"We own the streets, Justicia. It isn't like it was before you went in. But there's no way I could have kept you whole in the VCMP without the blessing of one of the two Hoenni teams. Their gangs run the prison from top to bottom. You'd have been dead inside of a week. Magma was the best choice we had."

* * *

"Fun?" she'd asked, more nonplussed than afraid.

"Isn't it obvious? We're gonna fuck you six ways from Sunday. We're gonna break that little body in, bitch. Courtney's arrangement with Queen Rocket was good for your stay and all, but unfortunately, that doesn't cover the concierge service."

* * *

"I'm sure it wasn't an easy choice to make." Justicia said, blankly.

* * *

"Oh," she'd said, with a dismissive wave. "Is that all? I thought you were gonna do something serious."

"That's some talk for a bitch who's about to be raped."

"You're not going to rape me."

* * *

The Madame Boss, who had been rotating a square, silver box in front of herself, ushered it across the table at Justicia. The cigarillo case plopped into her lap. Justicia took one, and lit it with the matching monogrammed lighter that was proffered alongside it. The tobacco smelled and tasted of dark honey and molasses. The Madame Boss inhaled deeply from her own, and sighed. "They wanted something from you, before you were released. Courtney told me as much, when we spoke."

"Yeah."

The Madame Boss leaned heavily against the table. "What was it?"

* * *

"Oh, you don't think we can?"

"I think you'll try. But you're forgetting something."

"And what's what? Remember there are six of us, and only one of you."

She'd only shrugged. "That's not it. I've got no doubt that I'm about to spend a lot of time on the floor with you sweaty fucks pumping away like Growlithe. But that doesn't mean you're going to rape me."

* * *

Justicia leaned back into her seat and put a hand over her eyes for a moment, but said nothing.

"Justicia, whatever it was, I will see that the score is settled."

* * *

"And why is that?"

"Because I'm the one who decides. I'm the one who decides to call it rape, or not," she had said, rolling compliantly onto her stomach and pushing her pants down onto her thighs.

* * *

Justicia, however briefly, smiled, before taking a hard pull at her cigarillo.

* * *

"You're a real stubborn bitch, aren't you?" The first one, Finch, said as he came on heavy and forceful, wedging himself into her with a grunt of satisfaction. "I kinda like it."

"Me too," she'd said, before wisely, biting down on the pillow. She wasn't sure just when it had ended, but those ten hours had felt longer than the whole rest of her sentence.

* * *

"It wasn't anything important." Justicia said with a half-hearted wave through the thick smoke. "Don't worry about it, Boss."

She nodded to the Madame Boss as she was dismissed, upon offering nothing further, and stood again slowly to leave. Hopefully, with any luck, the fierce cocktail of drugs and alcohol and Petrels equally fierce, if humorously unintended beating had cured her of any unfortunate side-effects that might have otherwise arisen. It really had been two flying types with one stone, so to speak. She didn't need to involve the Boss in a matter that was over and done with...

And besides, It was her grudge to settle, anyhow.


	7. "A Plan Comes Together"

Miyamoto clenched the wheel for a moment, adjusting herself in the seat so as to appear rigidly attentive. Archer, behind, voiced his concerns. "I don't know about this, Miyamoto."

She shushed him. She'd needed to put her plan into action much sooner than she had anticipated, but then, brevity being the soul of wit, she had gotten him on board with her plan insofar as it mattered. "Just do what I told you to, and this all works out fine."

She'd needed to make some fast alterations to the plan itself, however, when the opportunity had presented itself so openly. Further complicating things was the fact that she had just come from her own meeting with the Madame Boss, barely leaving enough time to change into what little disguise she'd actually put together, convince Archer to at least have a supporting role and bluff the remainder of both parts.

Justicia, outside, emerged at the top of the stairs leading down from the HQ. Archer tensed a breath. "What if things don't go how you hope? I don't exactly want to find out what Justice is gonna want to do to me, if this sets off some huge beef."

Miyamoto hissed. "It's not going to, alright? Just keep your mouth shut until I give you your cue."

The argument, if he'd truly had one, died in his throat as Justicia popped open the rear passenger's side door of the Madame Boss' sleek black car, and sat down inside. She nodded a bit listlessly at Archer in default recognition.

Archer, whose job it was to keep Justicia busy during this first leg of the trip so that she wouldn't take too close a look at the "unknown grunt" in the driver's seat, made a relatively decent display of rubbing his eyes when sunlight raked through the interior of the car, upon her opening of the door. "Ugh," he groaned, his hung-over countenance not entirely an act.

Justicia snorted. "Cute, Archie. You're not gonna ralph, are you?"

He weakly shook his head no.

"Good." She'd had enough vomit for a while. "Going my way?"

Miyamoto could have swore. She hadn't even thought about where Justicia lived! She adjusted a little nervously in her leather seat.

Archer, though, seemed to pick up on this and asked. "Depends where you're going."

Justicia shrugged. "I dunno. I thought I'd go have something that didn't taste like old bread, or cold soup for the first time in four years."

Archer blinked, hoping for a little more. "Food's that bad on the inside?"

"The food is pretty much the least shitty thing about being on the inside." Justicia commented, with a roll of her eyes. "Which ought to tell you how immensely shitty the rest of it is, by comparison."

Archer smiled a little to cover his obvious faux pas and pushed on, still hoping for a destination so Miyamoto could stop sitting there, with her ass hanging in the wind. "What did you have in mind?"

Justicia thought about it. "They got a pretty good fish joint on 28th and Main."

Miyamoto gently put the car into gear and pulled away, southbound, as Archer kept up the ruse.

"Fish?" Archer recoiled.

"I've been dreaming about a big plate of fried oysters for a while."

Archer felt queasy and this time, he didn't really have to act much. "Ugh, fried oysters?"

Justicia gave him a little shove with her forearm. "Viridianites are all the same. If it comes from the sea, none of you know a damn thing about what to do with it."

Archer balked. "I like seafood just fine it's just... fried oysters? Don't they get all mushy?"

"Practically melt in your mouth."

Archer's face paled. "I really think I'm gonna be sick."

Justicia gave him a solid poke. "See? That's how I know you don't know shit about sea-food. Next time we're in my hometown, I'll show you some real stuff. Not like these hole-in-the-wall spots you inlanders have. We make a fucking art out of it on the Cape."

"We'll see," he hazarded, before the car hit a chuckhole and then rooked slightly, off to one side, which was his cue. This road was not heavily trafficked at this time of day and so fortunately, he was able to get out of the car without delay once Miyamoto struggled to pull off to the shoulder. It was all a facade, he knew. The tires were run-flat, and no amount of abuse was going to bend the double-wall steel rims. He leapt out alongside Miyamoto with a quiet curse, as he looked back at the perfectly round tire. "Tch! Flat. Fucking pot-holes!

Miyamoto, not lowering her face below the hood, let out a hissing sound to denote frustration, as she passed the open door. Archer watched her gloved fingers slide down the doors edge to the the safety latch for the door locks, and flick it, in one brisk motion. He doubted anyone would have seen the move if they weren't looking for it.

Archer, sweating, looked back in at Justicia, who was frowning. Here was the part where he had to hope against hope that she didn't know better, or had no interest in getting out to look. She sat still for a long time, as Miyamoto went to the trunk to fetch the jack and the spare, ostensibly, but actually went to shut off the power circuit between the car phone and the antennae. "Well fuck, it looks like we're walking, then." She said, finally, and turned to open her door.

Since it would be stuck fast now, and she certainly wouldn't be able to unlock it, he very nearly said nothing and slammed the door shut, but Miyamoto caught him with an extreme look and so he yelped, instead.

"Oh, cool!" Archer cried, as Miyamoto came back with two objects, only one of which he expected to see. "It's got a hydraulic jack built right into the frame!"

He stepped briskly to the side and hunched near Miyamoto. "What the fuck was that doing in there?" He whispered angrily, and pointed, not at the hex-lever Miyamoto was cranking into an open bolt right above the tire well, but the other item she'd brought from the trunk: an obviously loaded shotgun.

"I don't fucking know!" she hissed back in a muted roar.

"Why, for Arceus' sake did you bring it out here?!"

"I don't want that fucking thing in the car when this shit pops off! Who the fuck knows what could happen?! Just fucking hide it!"

"Hide it?! Where the fuck am I supposed to hide it?! It's a fucking-"

"Hey, do you need me to get out?"

Archer popped back around the door when he heard Justicia shuffling across the bench seat. "No, no. We got it. Just popping the bolts off right now. Two more minutes. Just sit tight!" He finished pleasantly before wheeling on Miyamoto with a renewed whisper. "Where am I supposed to hide a fucking shotgun! This is a stupid fucking plan! I can't believe I-" He protested, but in short order, Miyamoto had popped the lever loose, letting the car hiss back down to an even kilter on it's hydraulics and had him by his flash, dragging him with her back up to full height.

Confusingly, she didn't deck him out, though he flinched like that might've been her intent. Instead, she hooked his elbow and spun him in place, and in one very disconcerting move, she flipped up his jacket and stuffed the sawed-off straight down the back of his pants, the ice-cold barrel pressed tight against his thigh. With a brisk flap, she put his jacket back down and nudged him out of the strange position. "Don't get busted with it on your way home."

And after that, she handed him the hex-lever, strode back to the driver's door and slammed the rear door shut along the way, narrowly stopping Justicia from emerging. As she turned to shut the barrier behind her that separated cabin from passenger-space, Archer could see Justicia giving him a confused look through the slightly cracked window. "Archie? What the fuck?"

All he had time to say before Miyamoto rolled that up, too, was "Sorry."

The cold look Justicia favored him with as the car pulled away made him feel very relieved to know that he had no further role to play. His relief lasted until he remembered that he had a loaded gun between his legs, and somehow had to find a way to walk six blocks without anyone noticing.

Miyamoto peeled her cap off and threaded fingers through her hair as she brought the car out onto Route 2. The hard part was over and the disguise was no longer really necessary. She glanced back in the rear-view just in time to see realization fade into cold anger.

"What is this?" Justicia demanded, voice not at all like it had been while dealing with Archer. Gone was any jovial overtone or slight wisp of sarcasm.

Miyamoto sneered. "Well, you had your chance to scare me and make it stick and you failed. Now it's my turn to show you how shit is really going to be. We're going to go for a drive."

"How you figure?" Justicia laughed, watching the road ahead of them. "Yer gonna take me out onto the plateau and then what?"

Miyamoto chuckled. "Then we do things the only way that makes sense at this point. I'll explain how things are going to be from now on and beat the living hell out of you to enforce the lesson, while you practice falling down and bleeding all over yourself."

"Fat fucking chance."

"That's the only kind of lesson people like you understand."

"You're going to get hurt, bitch."

Miyamoto just smiled in the mirror. "I'm going to love watching you choke on your own teeth."

Justicia shrugged. "Just remember I warned you. I mean, It's your choice, so long as you understand I can take anything I want from you. I've been out of the pen for a day and I've already stole your thunder, made you look like an idiot in front of the crew, and fucked your man. Get your fucking priorities straight here, because I'm guessing you ain't got a whole lot left worth having, but I'll still take it all if you push me even one more time."

"Look, we can go back and forth about this all day. Just sit there and wait until we're to the Cut, and then I'll pull over and let you see just how wrong you are. It doesn't have to come with a bunch of cheesy banter. Let's just get out of the car and do what comes natural, alright?"

Justicia smirked. All the pain in her stomach was seeping away, replaced by the pre-fight adrenaline dump. "Have it your way."

The Cut was a narrow man-made valley that had been blasted out of one of the many foothills that spread the gap between Indigo Plateau and Mt. Silver. It was a secluded, and hard to reach spot where Team Rocket handled business of the blackest sort. If something needed to happen that could never see the light of day, the Cut was where it took place. Bodies, among other things, tended to end up there.

They said nothing to each other for the remainder of the drive, just glancing at one another occasionally in the mirror. The silence lasted about an hour and forty minutes until at last, Miyamoto pulled off onto a rural stretch of dirt road and drove into a thick copse. From here the road degraded into something that could have been confused for a Deerling path but Miyamoto kept the car rolling, even as tree-branches reached out to scrape the windows from all sides.

When the foliage finally receded, they were in a steep ravine, with walls of rock on both sides. The Cut, so named, literally looked like a slice cut straight through the middle of an enormous hill, on account of being exactly that. Originally excavated for an expansion of the high-speed magnet-rail that had been abandoned after the downturn, it was replete with the evidence of unfinished construction.

Old, disused rail-road ties lay stacked in vine-covered piles, wood sopping and rotten. The old rails had long since been loaded out, either by the crews when they departed or by scrappers, but the huge dumps where they had once been deposited were still barren, even where all else was overgrown, a product of galvanizing zinc leaching into the soil below.

Miyamoto got out, and slowly opened the door, standing well away.

"Come on out, and I'll tell you how this goes."

Justicia did, already shrugging her shoulders in preparation for a good scrap. She closed the door behind herself, making a point of showing her flank to Miyamoto, to impress upon her that she was hardly afraid. Miyamoto didn't doubt that, particularly, but ignorance was certainly blissful, she supposed.

"Whenever you're ready, I want you to hit me as hard as you possibly can." Miyamoto explained, as though she were no more than commenting on the weather.

Justicia blinked.

"Then, I'm gonna hit you." Miyamoto cracked her knuckles loudly, not by pushing them together, but by tensing her hands tightly at her sides. "I figure we go back and forth like that. We each get one and then start over again. It ends whenever you say it does."

Having already casually slid a cigarette into her mouth, Justicia began to pat her jacket for the location of her lighter. "You know what?" she asked, finally procuring it. She lit the cigarette slowly, and took a long inhale and exhale without letting it leave her lips. "Maybe you should go first. That way-"

Justicia had certainly been about to say something smart-assed, but it was stolen out of her mouth. In the span of only just a few frames of her perception, Miyamoto went from very far, to very close. One moment, she had been standing three strides ahead, and the very next, all Justicia could see was Miyamoto's fist, those leather gloves so massive before her eyes.

The knuckles crashed into her teeth, smashing tobacco and embers into her mouth and the only reason she didn't go out immediately is because she managed to catch hold of the car-door's handle and keep herself from hitting the ground.

"Your turn." Miyamoto said, as Justicia leaned way over, swooned and spat leaf onto the ground.

Justicia, blood boiling, surged, balling both fists together into a heavy sidearm strike to Miyamoto's guts with vicious intent. It was the kind of blow that could burst a person's kidneys. Miyamoto only let out a gust of wind, for all the pain it caused her, and Justicia guessed that is was likely just a sharp exhale in order to tighten her diaphragm and abdominal wall for the blow itself, rather than any direct result of it. Even angrier now, and finally back at eye level with Miyamoto, Justicia followed with a sharp left cross.

Miyamoto slid sideways from the blow with effortless speed, entangling Justicia as if she had done no more than offer her arm to a dance partner. Miyamoto's own arm came over at the base of her fist, cinching it out of the air, and pulling it tight against her while her left snaked around so that it came under Justicia's shoulder. The move cinched Justicia behind her neck in a wide-open headlock, binding her rigidly into the exaggerated pose, arm at full extension.

In this way, Miyamoto used her body as fulcrum and the trapped arm, coupled with a harsh handful of Justicia's collar as a lever, to whip Justicia against the laminate window of the sedan so hard that blood squirted from her abused mouth in a splash across it's tinted surface.

Seemingly discontent with just that, the Castelian spun again, in the reverse direction, this time spilling Justicia over one leg. Justicia's feet flew out from under her and Miyamoto viciously propelled her against the dirt of the rural road, putting the back of her head through the passenger-side rear-view mirror on the way down. The mirror broke free with a crack that was not entirely that of screws and chassis aluminum.

"I said we'd each get one, gash. Don't get greedy again, or I will. Now, I'll be fair and call it your turn again." To her credit, Justicia did get back up, but it was only to be kicked hard in the gut. In this, Miyamoto had lied a bit, she realized, but it was just deserts.

Justicia stood again when the circling Miyamoto stepped away, feeling dizzy and bleeding from a head wound. Without a break, Justicia snarled and flew at her, everything curled into a punch that bore all of her weight, momentum, and fury. Though it was badly aimed, it connected solidly, and Justicia couldn't have imagined why. It had to have been the sloppiest blow she'd ever thrown.

It hardly mattered, since Miyamoto came back in an angry flash, her arm delivering all the power of her legs in a rising uppercut that made impact just as her knees straightened. The delivery was perfect, and Justicia came off her feet feeling as though she'd been propelled from them by fireworks tied to her ankles. Her crash across the hood of the car was the only thing that seemed to eliminate the possibility that she'd escaped gravity. It took her much longer to get up this time, fumbling on the edge of the bumper, to fall forward into her adversary.

Miyamoto lifted the dazed Rocket back to her feet, chuckling as a pokeball fell from Justicia's jacket along with a clatter of others. She'd hit the bitch so hard her trainer's belt had broken in the fall.

"Come on," Miyamoto insisted. "One more time. Hard as you can."

Justicia plowed her with everything, but Miyamoto ate the punch like she was made of granite. The return jab set her back a step, and felt like getting hit in the mouth with a brick.

"Again," Miyamoto said, evenly and without pause, jerking both hands in and out in a full-body beckoning. "I won't stop till you stop."

And so Justicia squared off with her, bloody mouth twisted into a pink grin. They kept teeing off one another over and over, each clutching a handful of hair at the base of the other's skull, driving home blow after blow, any one of which could probably have been lethal if delivered in the right context.

"It's gonna be a shame to wreck that pretty smile," Justicia offered, after receiving a blow that knocked a piece of molar under her tongue. Her reprisal must have been quite modest by comparison, since Miyamoto didn't even bother to look away.

"Can you taste your own asshole, yet?," Miyamoto asked, laying another massive left down Justicia's throat. When Justicia came back up, Miyamoto was still as rigid as blued steel, even as Justicia hunched, practically hanging from the fist that knotted tightly in Miyamoto's curly purple hair. "Or do I need to punch your tongue back just a little further?"

"Fuck you." Justicia said, spitting blood on the other woman's shoes, before swinging wildly. It was so badly aimed, it flew harmlessly over the taller woman's shoulder, even Miyamoto's attempts to align her jaw with it were insufficient. That's what she'd been doing, Justicia realized: Literally throwing her face right in the way of every blow.

Miyamoto sighed at the disgraceful display. "Do you want to go again?"

"No, you go."

The haymaker to the guts finally dropped Justicia to one knee where Miyamoto, evidently tired of holding her up, shoved her onto her back.

Justicia spat more blood, and hoped vomit wasn't going to follow it. She doubted Miyamoto would be impressed much at all. Still, she did have one more move to make, provided she could manage it. All she had to do was pucker her lips and blow one clear note. It proved more difficult than expected, since her mouth seemed to be filling with blood almost as fast as she could empty it, but the second she did, the tide of the battle turned in her favor.

When she'd fallen earlier and dropped her belt, she'd made sure to kick a particular ball under the car, where it had quietly released it's contents. Her Staryu sprang from beneath like a hurled shuriken, dealing a loud cacophony of blows to the middle of Miyamoto's spine as the Pokemon's hardened limbs collided over and over with it's target in a devilish Rapid Spin.

Miyamoto sprang away from a follow up, and another, but Staryu arced like a boomerang around the front of the car and took her in the knee, glancingly, causing her to falter.

"You don't train any pokemon, do you?" Justicia snorted with derision, as Miyamoto dropped to the hood, narrowly avoiding Staryu again has it passed.

Miyamoto hollered back loudly. "I don't need to! I can handle my own problems!"

"Oh, looks that way, doesn't it?" Justicia laughed, the irony on her tongue almost more flavorful than coppery blood.

She shortly ate her words though, as Staryu arced back again for another strafing run. In a blisteringly fast move, Miyamoto rolled twice across the hood, reached to pop the latch, and elbowed the hood up high. Staryu, too committed to the dive, hit the underside of the hood with a clang, and fell across the engine block. Miyamoto, either for good measure or added insult, slammed the hood back down again, trapping her pokemon in place.

Justicia rolled for another pokeball, but Miyamoto was already there in a staccato of light strides, kicking them away, so she just laid there in the dirt for a while, sighing and holding her stomach.

She didn't particularly want to look up. Miyamoto didn't sound like she was nearby, but she figured if she made any sudden moves, she could probably expect to get stomped on or worse, so she held still.

The silence went on and on. It went on for so long in fact, that Justicia had to speak up. She realized halfway through her sentence that she was asking the same question Miyamoto was.

"Are we done yet?" they asked one another in unison.

Their murmurs of laughter mirrored one another as well.

Justicia rolled slowly. Miyamoto was in fact quite near by, being crouched beside her just beyond arm's reach. Justicia frowned. "So, go ahead then, say your fucking bit. Tell me how you think I'm going to kowtow at your every fucking word, and lick the shit off your boots, because you got one over on me." She spat blood, which fortunately mostly missed Miyamoto, as she was quite certain it would have brought on a renewed ass-beating. "Tell me how fucking naive you are, just go right ahead and think I won't have my reprisal somewhere down the line."

"I thought I might, you know..." Miyamoto began, shaking her head. "Say just the most fucked up shit I could think of, while I had you here flat on your ass, while I knew you had to listen to it. Tell you all the shit about me you're never going to figure out on your own, because you were born a stupid rich girl, and all you ever had to do was shut your fucking mouth, spread your legs and suck some old man's curdled jizz to get by perfectly well, and that you're never going to be the same as me because you've lived your pampered little life here in Kanto, where the summers are cool and the winters are warm, and there's food everywhere you go-"

Justicia gave a salty grimace. "Oh, so now all of a sudden you know everything about me, huh?"

"No, you ignorant cunt." Miyamoto sighed. "I don't know shit about you. And you don't know shit about me. Shut up and listen."

"I thought I was going to tell you how you were never going to be the same as me, because you came from a fucking old-world mansion, and I grew up in the back corner of a fucking storm-drain with eight other sick-ass miserable people who wanted me dead more often than not. I was gonna tell you how you were never going to be the same as me because you grew up eating lobster dinner, while I was beating Rattata to death with old car-parts and not even spitting the fur out I was so starving..."

Miyamoto laughed. "I was going to tell you a whole lot of shit, really. But then, you know, I had a conversation with the Madame Boss."

"Ah," said Justicia. "And she put you off of it?"

"No." Miyamoto busted out laughing. "She told me she wanted us to be partners."

Justicia stared blankly. She had assumed Miyamoto and Archer were partners, the way they had behaved. She'd certainly thought that Herself and Pierce would be put back together, at any rate. She knit her brow, at first, a bit devastated. Why would the Boss put them together?

Miyamoto held out both hands in something of a shrug, as though she'd heard Justicia's unasked question. "If it's you and me, together, I don't think we should have any problems. We're not a damn thing alike, but we're both the best the Regulars have. It makes sense that we should be paired together." She shook one hand, then, the knuckles of the glove splotchy red with weeping blood. Whether it was her own, or Miyamoto's, Justicia could not tell "I'm pretty sure I can work with you, now that I've got all of my frustration out. What about you? I think I could take a few more, if you're sore about me bringing up ancient history."

Justicia's eyes widened, but she felt her lip curling at the edge. "I could take another swing."

Miyamoto sighed. "If that's what it takes-"

Justicia reached forward as fast as she could and slapped Miyamoto across the face. Justicia knew a lot of ways to injure someone, but there were still few things that expressed insult quite so well as an open palm. She was quite pleased with the results too, as a bright red welt sprang instantly to life across Miyamoto's fair cheek. The purple-haired woman tutted. While she didn't bring a hand up to rub at her face, she also didn't strike back, either. Justicia considered pushing her luck then and taking another, but the pooling blood in her mouth made her change her mind. To be honest, she wasn't sure what to say. It didn't seem like she had any choice in the matter, at any rate. She shrugged. "Alright."

Miyamoto stood, and reached down to her, not waiting for Justicia to refuse the offer, as she most certainly would have, and instead wrenching her up onto her feet again by two handfuls of her flash. Justicia's balance was wobbly, but she found herself staring at Miyamoto quite intensely, once they were eye to eye.

"Arent you hurt at all?" Justicia eventually asked, voice slightly desperate.

Miyamoto nodded. "I'm pretty sure you cracked my palette." She tongued something on the inside of her mouth and winced heavily.

Justicia frowned. "I don't see any blood." It was hard to see in the deep shade of the Cut, not to mention her vision was still a bit blurry from head-trauma.

On command, Miyamoto stuck a finger between her lips and the pale gray leather came back coated voluminously in red. "I've been swallowing it."

Justicia shook her head, slowly, realizing that she hadn't really seen or met Miyamoto's type before. "Good to know you're not completely invulnerable."

Miyamoto, for her part, only smirked, but then shuffled backwards and leaned against the car. "Dunno why you'd say that. I'm the one who's gonna be watching your back from now on, Justicia."

Justicia smiled. "You can call me Justice, if you want."

Miyamoto scoffed. "I'd rather not. That's a stupid name for a Rocket. Justicia is bad enough. Who names their kid after a flower?"

Justicia pursed her lips, evidently taking offense. "And Miyamoto means what, in Unovan? Probably something fanciful like 'Moon Baby' or 'Clefairy that Shits with Both Legs Raised'."

Miyamoto did laugh at that, but then became thoughtful. "Miyamoto means..." she struggled to translate it in a way that would make sense in Kantonese. "It means something like 'Base of the Shrine' or 'Temple Foundation'."

Justicia flattened out her brows. "That's the worst. Unovan names are so pretentious. Don't you have a nickname?"

Miyamoto shrugged. She had one that she could think of that wasn't black-humored or somehow related to her reputation. "There were a few cops in Castelia who used to call me Mama-Miya, whenever I was going through processing."

Justicia nodded appraisingly. "Alright then, Miya. You can call me... J, then. If you want."

"Alright." Miyamoto nodded. "Lets get out of here, then, if it's all settled. This place gives me the creeps."

J glanced around. The Cut wasn't exactly a comforting locale, since it was the last place most people who had serious beef with the Team ever saw, but there was nothing about it other than it's unnatural formation that made it feel disconcerting to her. Unless Miyamoto was talking about the other thing.

"Oh, come on, you don't believe in King Nero, do you?"

Miya looked back at her, with a vacant expression. King Nero was an old story that kept getting retold about a Nidoking that had been abandoned - or euthanized, but which exactly varied from telling to telling - by it's trainer in or near the Cut, because of how unruly and violent it had become. In some particularly grand weavings of the tale, King Nero had even killed the trainer's friend, or rival, or baby sister, or whatever the case might've been. Whichever it happened to be, what was always unanimous in all the stories was that King Nero either as beast or beastly apparition had a taste for human flesh, and now lingered near the Cut, primarily because of what team Rocket did there, which was deposit the freshly dead into shallow graves. As such, the story was quite commonly told among them, however apocryphal.

J had to admit, that while she'd never lent it any credence before, before, the words Miyamoto said next did send a small shiver coursing down the small of her back. "Well, something must be emptying the graves," she said, pointing to a patch of bare earth. near a large pile of coal pitch. "Otherwise I'm pretty sure I'd have filled that plot already, at least."

J frowned, with the sudden feeling that Miyamoto was only trying to get under her skin. She huffed. "Oh, quit bullshitting."

Miya guffawed. "Alright, come on," she said, popping the doors.

After taking a few moments to collect her shit, extricating and returning Staryu in particular, J slid into the car, slightly annoyed, but her stomach quaking reminded her of a subject long forgotten. "I still want those fucking oysters."

Miyamoto looked up in the mirror. "You sure?"

"What's the matter, are Unovans scared of the sea, too?"

Miyamoto smirked. "In Castelia? Not really. We'll eat anything in Castelia. But if it's fried food we're talking about, it's really more you Kantonese that don't know what the hell you're doing."

"You're on." Justicia said with a smirk.

After a few long minutes of driving, Justicia opened her mouth to explain something. "I was joking earlier. I didn't fuck Pet."

Miyamoto didn't want to hear it though. "Man, fuck Pet." She was over that.

It was a long ride back to Viridian, but the consolation was that Archer had plenty of time to meet them there. He'd hesitated at first, when Miyamoto had called from the car phone, but he came loping through the double doors of the establishment with a mostly relieved look on his face, as J and Miya sat eating, making acclamations as to the quality of the meal, even as they hissing, stinging complaints about the hot remoulade and lemon wedges that outlined their cracked lips and bleeding mouths with fire.

Justicia gave Archer a very cool look, one that forced him to sit on Miyamoto's side of the bench, but she was the first one to offer Archer one of the fried shellfish. He didn't eat it at first, clutching it between two fingers. "So, how did it go?"

J coughed, but Miyamoto offered fiat accompli. "That's another one of those things I'll tell you when you've got a shield of your own."

Archer sighed.

"So did you ditch the piece?" Miyamoto asked with a nudge.

"Uh," Archer said hesitantly.

Her eyes bugged out. "It's been almost 4 hours. Don't tell me you've been-"

At this, Archer pulled one white pant-leg tight against his calf, showing the outline of the shotgun grip poking out above the knee. They shortly because whispering angrily at one another again. "What was I supposed to do, throw it in somebody's mailbox?"

"Not walk around with it all day, for fuck's sake."

"Well gimme the fucking keys, so I can put it back where it belongs!"

"Arceus, you're such a fucking-" Miyamoto hissed to a stop as a waitress passed and asked if they were alright. Pleasantly, she asked for another beer. Archer declined anything, and J, holding out her empty basket of oysters, nodded when she was asked if she wanted more.

Miyamoto rubbed her nose, and passed off the keys. "Just go put it in the car and get it out of here, alright?"

Archer accepted the keys, as though he'd never wanted anything more, and moved to slide out of the seat, but Miyamoto stopped him. "Uh, take the car over the the garage first before you go back with it. I knocked off a mirror."

Archer gasped. "How the hell did you manage that?" Everything on the car was reinforced, to protect the Madame Boss. It would've had to have been something pretty serious.

"My face." J said, with a growing frown.

Archer glanced both of them up and down, as if he were just now noticing their injuries past his relief at no longer being alone with an unpermitted firearm. They smiled back with split-lipped grins and a pair of blacked eyes, between them. "You two are fucking insane."

He moved to slide out again, but this time it was J who stopped him, putting her leg up on the side of the seat. When he turned, confused, she pointed at the oyster in his clutches. "Try it, before you go."

He cautiously bit off a small piece of it, and immediately grimaced. "That's putrid."

J and Miya only rolled their eyes at each other as he left, flicking the remainder onto the sidewalk once he'd exited.

"Viridianites," they each said in mock derision.


	8. "Among Friends"

J's promised reprisal didn't come for two months after their discussion at The Cut but when it came, it came hard, fast and from an unexpected source, to be honest.

Miyamoto had been sitting in the car with Pierce, when it had happened. Just the two of them, quiet and listening as they always were. They were only supposed to be waiting on J, to pick her up from a meet with two small-time producers, looking to sell goods in Viridian. She supposed that was why it had taken her by surprise. The mundanity of it, really. She remembered Pierce saying something, very quietly and very slowly. It had been a clear, concise query. In the fog of her mind, she struggled to recall what it was.

"Hey," he'd said, ashing out his cigarette in the pull-down tray, before looking at her. "What would you do if I knocked you the fuck out, right now?"

She remembered smiling, struck first by the humor of just such an outcome, before he'd removed all sense of comedy from the notion at all, by doing just that. The pistol grip in his hand connected with her face in a sharp backwards arc, from nowhere. The first one had only stunned her of course, but the second one? She was still feeling that one. A sharp line of pain across the top of her head told her that there had been a few more to follow it, just to ensure she would stay down.

The car had moved, to an old bridge to the north of where they'd been in the industrial sector, even though she was right where the blows to the head had left her, slumped and unconscious against the glass. She woke up hot and angry, and turned to flash out, but Pierce was no longer there.

He was still in the car, she found out a moment later, when the sound of an automatic clicking out of the safe position hit her ears. She looked up in the mirror. He was seated behind her, reclined well out of grabbing range. A new cigarette billowed into the evening air through a span of open window. She felt the barrel nudge her lower back through the seat-padding.

She didn't bother to try the door. He would've already locked it. She knew that well enough.

Petrel was the charismatic one. Tyson was the muscle. Archer had the head for business, and J was the one who got shit done...but Pierce?

Pierce was the opportunist. She recognized that about him, moreso now than she ever had. Pierce had this all planned out and she knew it, so she just sat back into her seat, and tried to clear her vision, while she waited for him to speak.

"Let me tell you something about the Regulars, Miyamoto."

He turned one hand over in the mirror. "Well, about the Regulars, and about why you shouldn't have done what you did."

"I'm listening."

"That's good. The second you decide to do anything but listen is when I blow your fucking guts into the glove compartment." He said, his voice patient, even, and practiced. "So, look, this should be obvious to you, but, we're all a team, here, Miyamoto. Not just the Team team, but us, the Regulars. We're the home chapter. The first chapter. The mother chapter. Madame Boss' best and brightest, right?"

"I understand that."

"Really?" Pierce countered. "Because I'm not sure you appreciate it the same way we do."

"The beef is over, between us, Peirce. J and I are partners, now. This isn't necessary."

"There never should have been any beef." Pierce said, and though he didn't change his tone, Miyamoto could see his eyes narrow, ever so slightly. "And if there was, it shouldn't have been carried out in secret. We can settle our shit out in the open. I don't care so much that it came to blows. We're Rockets. Hell, that's normal for us..."

Miyamoto felt emboldened by the fact that the reflection of Pierce in the mirror had condensed from many rotating images, to just a few, so she went to speak, but Pierce stabbed the gun harder into the seat, and spoke before she could. "If you open your mouth before I am finished again, I'm going to blow holes in you until this is empty. I promise you that you're not going to walk away from this car, unless I end our conversation under the strong impression that you heard me. So far you're not doing a great job."

She sat back again, and shut her mouth, unwilling to test his resolve.

"Now, look. You need to get one thing very clear: What you tried to do, after Justice got out? Taking her out to The Cut, and beating on her like you did? You could have done that to anybody else in the Regulars, and probably got off scot-free. If it was me you wanted, well, you could have had me on a platter. None of the boys are especially tight with me, and Justice, well, you could have probably talked her into helping you out, just like you did Archer.

"Archer? Well, the only reason he went along with you, is because he's young, and stupid, and he didn't know any better, otherwise, I'd have his stupid ass in here right alongside you. Petrel would've rolled over on him in a heartbeat, if he was the one you wanted.

"Ty? Maybe you'd have had a harder time with him, but he's not exactly bright, is he? That one, you could have had on your own, and if you cowed him, so what? He's a pushover anyhow.

"Petrel? Well, just about any of us would have set Petrel up for you, wouldn't we? Except maybe you, of course, but then, that's your sickness, sister. Not ours.

"But when you went after Justice, that was a mistake." Pierce held up a finger and wagged it. "We don't fuck with Justice."

Pierce and her met eyes, and for a moment, she could see a brief flash of the anger that Pierce had so far concealed. "I can tell you're thinking that's because we're scared of her." He chuckled. "Just like we ought to be. Just like we ought to be of you, right?"

"It's true really," Pierce explained. "You and her are two of a kind. Killers, dyed in the wool. Like there was never anything more for you in life. You two were practically born with blood on your hands, weren't you?

"And oh the Madame Boss loves you for it, doesn't she? She should. She's a lady with a lot of ugly problems that can only be solved by you and her, you know. She found Justice, and she was a fucking godsend. Right when the team needed her most, she was there, in the thick of it. And then, here the Madame Boss just so happens to stumble across you, right as Justice gets pinned down on some one-eight-seven shit. Must've seemed like providence. Hell, now, with the two of you out in the world? She's finally got her left glove to match the right.

"But that's not the truth, is it? It's not so convenient as that. Or maybe it is, for you, and that's why we're sitting here, now. Maybe for you, this is all you know, and all you ever want to know. Maybe you really were born with blood on your hands. Maybe you're really just one of the old Warriors, fallen from time. But I don't think you are.

"Because the truth is that you're both damaged. Something inside you got fucked up real bad, a long time ago, and you never got right again. You came back to balance maybe, you started to function again, but you're still fucking dead inside. That part of you ain't ever gonna get well again. And for you, maybe, that part is gone to rot. It's spoiled, and eventually everything else inside you is gonna go that same way, too, right along with it. One day you're gonna wake up, and that's all that's gonna be left of you.

"That's the day you just get up and walk outside, and nothing else matters. You just lose it. You just fucking go insane, and you kill everything you can get your hands on," he held up his fingers to his temple, clicking his thumb. "Till you're on the eleven-o'clock news, Jennies are icing your crazy ass in front of a convenience store, and they're counting your death-toll for the record books." He made a little bang sound, as he pulled the finger-gun away.

"Justice isn't like that." Pierce shook his head. "Different life. Different circumstances. Same result, but for Justice, this is what's keeping her together. I heard from Justice every week she was in the VCMP. You know what she talked about, every, single, time? The Team. The Regulars. Us. Justice is fucked up, and we all know it, but she's still ours.

"You see, Justice came to us from a seriously messed up place. Just like you did. Not the same kind of place, but when things are fucked up that bad, it stops mattering so much. Once you've stacked shit that fucking high, what's the point in counting anymore? Bad is bad. You and her have seen shit that any normal person would never understand, so it doesn't fucking matter. The thing is, Justice stuck her neck out for us, and the Regulars don't answer that sort of shit with indifference. Justice may strike you as the most ruthless of all of us, and that may be true, but she is also the most beloved one.

"Tyson would fight you over one unkind word about Justice.

"Archer hardly knew her before, and now he and her have been thick as thieves since the second you and her were done scrapping with each other.

"Petrel still has the fucking hots for her, even if he involuntarily holds his junk when she walks past.

"And me? Well, I'm about to kill you over it, if things don't go the right way, aren't I?

"She's family. She's blood. She's a Regular.

"Now, here's the thing: It's you and her, now. Madame Boss wants you together, so that's that. And if what you say is true, everything is hunky-dory between you two, so that's good, too, in it's way. But where I grow concerned is when it comes to the matter we just discussed: you and her both being completely certifiable.

"I don't think Justice is going to end up on the news. You, however, that's another story. And with you in the mix, her stability is looking a whole lot more questionable, as well."

He paused, and Miyamoto got the hint that she was supposed to say something. She weighed out her choices, and then went with the least damaging option. "You want me to tell you that I won't break her." Miyamoto guessed, but that was plainly ludicrous. "Look, Pierce, I don't think you really appreciate the gravity of what you're saying. She ain't made of glass. J is every bit as tough as I am. Maybe tougher."

"You're damn right she is." Pierce permitted, with a chuckle. "I don't care what you might think about what went down in The Cut, but I'm telling you, in a fair fight, things would have gone different."

Miyamoto arched both brows. "I gave her a fair fight, and she took it."

Pierce flattened his. "No," he explained. "You goaded her into duking it out with you, a day after she came out of the pen. Not only that, but from what I hear, some Magma grunts gave her a real work-over before she left the joint, maybe even worse than just a work-over. Plus she and Pet got into it after the party and word is, Pet got some pretty good licks in, too, even though he's telling a much different story."

"She didn't tell me none of that."

"Why would she, dumbass?" Peirce hissed. "She has to look like a diamond in front of you. Doubly so now that you're working together. It's not like it takes a genius to figure that out. If you'd have taken Justice out there at one-hundred percent, she would have beaten your ass so bad, you'd have developed a speech-impediment. Don't sit there and think you're so fuckin-

Something hit the side of the car, heavily, then, and as Miyamoto wheeled around she saw that it wasn't a something, but rather, a someone. Pierce was a fairly large man, tall and lean, but still heavy, but the person on the outside of the car was making up for that, by taking both feet off the ground to rip him through the window.

J must have missed them at the pickup, but now she had found them.

Miya's partner put both boots to the door, and balanced herself with two handfuls of his flash. Then, rather than actively attempt to pull him through the window, she more made it impossible for him to not come through the window by straightening her body out like an arrow. Pierce was torn out of his seat, banged his head on the roof on his way over the door, and fell overtop of the woman who'd wrenched him there when gravity took over.

J shoved him off, and clambered over him, and drilled him in the stomach, the ribs, the neck, anything she could get a shot at, like a frenzied animal. He let go of the gun at some point, and she collected it as she came to her feet. She hurled it off the side of the bridge and into the drink.

Miyamoto didn't realize just how out of it she was until she swooned in her seat, and fell face-first into the window again, blackness swelling in from the rim of her vision until it was nearly all she could see. Apparently spinning around so fast had rattled something loose. Maybe she'd been hit harder than she thought. She heard J start yelling, but couldn't make it out.

They both stood and screamed for a while, and then J shoved Pierce until he fell on his ass again, and then kicked and stomped at him until he reluctantly but wisely left the scene.

When her partner opened the car door, it was all she could do and then some to keep from falling onto the pavement. To her surprise, J wedged herself under her arms, and heaved her back upright. "Fuck, Miya, you are bleeding all over the place."

She could feel it now, running down her neck, where she hadn't before. Her adrenaline was waning. She must've taken way more knocks to the head than she'd thought. Still, all she could think of to do was apologize.

J helped her get her feet on the ground. "What? What the hell are you sorry for?"

"Pierce," she said wobbly, trying to stand under her own steam and failing. "He was shitty for that crap I pulled, back when..." She balanced herself on the hood for a moment, to steady herself.

"Arceus, you fuck a guy a few times, he thinks he has to go White Knight you for the rest of his fucking life." J looked askance in the direction she'd driven Pierce off into. "I'm gonna cave his damn head in-"

"No, Pierce asked me... He wanted...to..." She tripped, but J was underneath her again. She couldn't get her head together. "He didn't want me to fuck you over. He knows about..."

J screamed in frustration. "What the fuck are you talking about?" She leaned heavily inward as Miyamoto bowed out, and eventually settled with easing her down into a kneeling position. "Why the fuck would he say some shit like that? We're partners, Miya!"

"Because, J..." Miyamoto said, suddenly feeling all too present in the moment. She looked at her partner, with half-dilated eyes.

"Pierce knows I killed my last partner."


End file.
